The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

The hero in the Mirror

Relational PeRsPectives Book seRies Volume 41

RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES LEWIS ARON & ADRIENNE HARRIS Series Editors

The Relational Perspectives Book Series (RPBS) publishes books that grow out of or contribute to the relational tradition in contemporary psychoanalysis. The term “relational psychoanalysis” was first used by Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) to bridge the traditions of interpersonal relations, as developed within interpersonal psychoanalysis and object relations, as developed within contemporary British theory. But, under the seminal work of the late Stephen Mitchell (1988), the term “relational psychoanalysis” grew and began to accrue to itself many other influences and developments. Various tributaries—interpersonal psychoanalysis, object relations theory, self psychology, empirical infancy research, and elements of contemporary Freudian and Kleinian thought—flow into this tradition, which understands relational configurations between self and others, both real and fantasied, as the primary subject of psychoanalytic investigation. We refer to the relational tradition, rather than to a relational school, to highlight that we are identifying a trend, a tendency within contemporary psychoanalysis, not a more formally organized or coherent school or system of beliefs. Our use of the term “relational” signifies a dimension of theory and practice that has become salient across the wide spectrum of contemporary psychoanalysis. Now under the editorial supervision of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, the Relational Perspectives Book Series originated in 1990 under the editorial eye of the late Stephen A. Mitchell. Mitchell was the most prolific and influential of the originators of the relational tradition. He was committed to dialogue among psychoanalysts and he abhorred the authoritarianism that dictated adherence to a rigid set of beliefs or technical restrictions. He championed open discussion, comparative and integrative approaches, and he promoted new voices across the generations. Included in the Relational Perspectives Book Series are authors and works that come from within the relational tradition, extend and develop the tradition, as well as works that critique relational approaches or compare and contrast them with alternative points of view. The series includes our most distinguished senior psychoanalysts along with younger contributors who bring fresh vision.

RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES LEWIS ARON & ADRIENNE HARRIS Series Editors Vol. 41 The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude Sue Grand

Vol. 27 The Designed Self: Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Identities Carlo Strenger

Vol. 40 The Analyst in the Inner City, Second Edition: Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens Neil Altman

Vol. 26 Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education Emanuel Berman

Vol. 39 Dare to be Human: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Journey Michael Shoshani Rosenbaum

Vol. 25 Gender as Soft Assembly Adrienne Harris

Vol. 38 Repair of the Soul: Metaphors of Transformation in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis Karen E. Starr Vol. 37 Adolescent Identities: A Collection of Readings Deborah Browning (ed.) Vol. 36 Bodies in Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension Frances Sommer Anderson (ed.) Vol. 35 Comparative-Integrative Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective for the Discipline’s Second Century Brent Willock Vol. 34 Relational Psychoanalysis, V. III: New Voices Melanie Suchet, Adrienne Harris, & Lewis Aron (eds.) Vol. 33 Creating Bodies: Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival Katie Gentile Vol. 32 Getting From Here to There: Analytic Love, Analytic Process Sheldon Bach Vol. 31 Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World Danielle Knafo & Kenneth Feiner Vol. 30 The Healer’s Bent: Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter James T. McLaughlin Vol. 29 Child Therapy in the Great Outdoors: A Relational View Sebastiano Santostefano Vol. 28 Relational Psychoanalysis, V. II: Innovation and Expansion Lewis Aron & Adrienne Harris (eds.)

Vol. 24 Minding Spirituality Randall Lehman Sorenson Vol. 23 September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds Susan W. Coates, Jane L. Rosenthal, & Daniel S. Schechter (eds.) Vol. 22 Sexuality, Intimacy, Power Muriel Dimen Vol. 21 Looking for Ground: Countertransference and the Problem of Value in Psychoanalysis Peter G. M. Carnochan Vol. 20 Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity Stephen A. Mitchell Vol. 19 Who is the Dreamer, Who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences James S. Grotstein Vol. 18 Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis Steven H. Cooper Vol. 17 The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective Sue Grand Vol. 16 Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration Kenneth A. Frank Vol. 15 The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration Rochelle G. K. Kainer Vol. 14 Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition Stephen A. Mitchell & Lewis Aron (eds.)

RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES LEWIS ARON & ADRIENNE HARRIS Series Editors Vol. 13 Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation: Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process Karen Maroda Vol. 12 Relational Perspectives on the Body Lewis Aron & Frances Sommer Anderson (eds.) Vol. 11 Building Bridges: Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis Stuart A. Pizer Vol. 10 Fairbairn, Then and Now Neil J. Skolnick and David E. Scharff (eds.) Vol. 9 Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis Stephen A. Mitchell Vol. 8 Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis Donnel B. Stern Vol. 7 Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis Charles Spezzano & Gerald J. Gargiulo (eds.) Vol. 6 The Therapist as a Person: Life Crises, Life Choices, Life Experiences, and Their Effects on Treatment Barbara Gerson (ed.) Vol. 5 Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective Joyce A. Slochower Vol. 4 A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis Lewis Aron Vol. 3 The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens Neil Altman Vol. 2 Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis Charles Spezzano Vol. 1 Conversing with Uncertainty: Practicing Psychotherapy in a Hospital Setting Rita Wiley McCleary

The hero in the Mirror From Fear to Fortitude

Sue Grand

New York London

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 27 Church Road Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA

© 2010 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number: 978-0-88163-437-2 (Hardback) 978-0-88163-482-2 (Paperback) For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, please access www. copyright.com (http://www.copyright.com/) or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users. For organizations that have been granted a photocopy license by the CCC, a separate system of payment has been arranged. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grand, Sue. The hero in the mirror : from fear to fortitude / Sue Grand. p. cm. -- (Relational perspectives book series ; 41) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-88163-437-2 (hbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-88163-482-2 (pbk.) -- ISBN 9780-203-88832-2 (e-book) 1. Courage. 2. Heroes--Psychology. 3. Identity (Psychology) I. Title. BF575.C8G73 2010 179’.6--dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledgementalhealth.com

2009021074

To Jennifer Leighton, Dori Laub, and Bernard Rous With gratitude

Contents

Acknowledgments 1

The Hero in the Mirror

xi 1

Section I  Heroes and Warriors 2

Combat Speaks I: Heroic Performance and Civilian Desire

23

3

Combat Speaks II: Grief and Tragic Memory

43

Section II  Childhood and the Heroic Imagination 4

Fantastic Dangers: Reality Meets the Edge of the World

67

5

Strange Bodies in Strange Encounters: Transfiguration and Inquiry

93

Section III  Analytic Heroes: Finding Courage 6

False Courage, Analytic Lies

115

7

Intrepid Subjects: Rescuing Lost Generations

135

Section IV  Resisting Demonic Heroes 8 9

Restoring Reverence to Sacrificial Bodies: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, Torture

155

Dignifying the Abject: Genocide and State Terror

171

Epilogue

189

References

195

Index

209 ix

Acknowledgments

For more than 30 years, I have been moved by my patients’ courage. Their struggles have inspired this book. Several of my patients have given me permission to tell their stories. I want to thank them for their openness and their collaboration. Once I embarked on this project, I had so many people facilitating me. I have been inspired by the work of Eve Ensler, Martin Duberman, Mark Matousec, and Paula Allen. I have learned a great deal from their art and from their social activism. As an author, I have had the good fortune to have Adrienne Harris as my editor. Adrienne has had a remarkable ability to listen to my nascent ideas. When I was confused, her interventions moved me towards clarity. She was unfailingly optimistic, always supportive, and she helped me to unravel creative blocks. With her exceptional intellect and scholarship, she enhanced this project at every turn. Working with her was a gift. I would like to thank Lew Aron, for facilitating this relationship and for sustaining the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis during challenging times. I am grateful to that community for providing me with a psychoanalytic home that is theoretically diverse and socially conscious. I would also like to thank Joyce Slochower, for her profound insights and for her willingness to read, and critique, early drafts. When I grew weary and lost confidence in this project, Joyce infused me with direction and hope. I could not have completed this book without her support. I also want to give special thanks to Lynne Layton, who has integrated the clinical and the cultural in her own work. It was Lynne who helped me understand that my ideas were best communicated through storytelling; she helped me embrace, and empower, that mode of communication. In the course of writing this book, I have had many challenging moments. I had a formidable team of friends and colleagues who sustained me and encouraged me: Neil Altman, Barbara Suter, Judie Alpert, Johanna Bodenstab, Karen Hopenwasser, Aviva Itzkowitz, Peggy Levison, Lynne Layton, Dori Laub, Jennifer Leighton, Mary Lou Lionells, Bruce xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Reis, Fred See, Bonnie See, Jared See, Sam Schimmel, Sandra Shapiro, Joyce Slochower, Marcia Shulman, Ashley Judd, Vivian Rous, Helga Grunberg, Andrew Weiss, and Lurline Aslanian. I was particularly sustained by Peggy Levison’s brilliant grasp of the absurd; I would be lost without her solidarity and dark humor. Without my personal assistant, Aviva Itzkowitz, my entire life would have fallen apart during this project. Aviva has been endlessly resourceful, always encouraging, cheerful, and always ready to help. She was calm and patient with my technophobia and meticulous in working on my references. In addition to these influences, I want to thank Mary Lou Lionells, Dori Laub, and Judy Alpert for being such wonderful professional mentors. These mentors have deeply believed in me, and they have given me excellent guidance. They have also shared with me a deep conviction that psychoanalysis is an ethical practice. Over many years, we have had stimulating conversations, and we have reached this conclusion: We cannot become “well” unless we live with integrity and concern. This perspective facilitated my first book; it has given rise to my vision of the ordinary hero, as it emerges throughout this work. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, for raising me amidst books, progressive politics, critical thought, and diverse ideas. I would like to thank my husband, Bernard Rous, for his boundless nurturance and support throughout this project. For 30 years, I have been exposed to his brilliant mind, his humanity, and his inquiring nature. All of my ideas gestate in our conversations. This book would not exist without those conversations.

1 The Hero in the Mirror

In times of trouble, we are inspired by courage. In every life and in the life of every culture, there are moments of danger. In our personal lives, we have intimate anxieties, interpersonal conflicts, traumatic encounters, and real-life reversals. We are challenged by terminal illness, job loss, the death of a loved one. In analysis, we face uncomfortable truths. As citizens of the world, we are exposed to economic instability, global violence, and the effects of global warming. Some of us have endured genocide, earthquake; too many of us are living in a war zone. In the course of human existence, danger takes many forms. There are vast differences between our predicaments. But these predicaments illuminate human bravery. In the midst of fear, people keep faith with the self, and they keep faith with the dignity of others. As clinicians and as citizens of the world, we are moved by this capacity. We start to ask ourselves questions. What is courage? Will we find it when our time comes? Can we find creative solutions when our problems overwhelm us? Who do we become when everything seems lost? When we feel threatened, what happens to our ethics? What is the price of survival and self-preservation? Is it possible to act on behalf of ourselves and for the other? If we are fortunate, these questions awaken our own potential. They widen our circle of empathy and allow us to appreciate the strengths and the resources of others. They permit us to see the heroic capacity in ourselves. But all too often, these questions become an affliction. They roil around inside of us and can become the occasion for shame, paralysis, deference, or self-attack. When this happens, we cannot find the hero in ourselves. We cannot reach across difference and join hands with another. And so, we turn to something else. We fantasize about Heroes and Cowards and Villains. These figures infuse our inner worlds and we act them out. As individuals, as families, as small groups and large collectives, we construct an idealized Heroic self which few of us can really live up to. We create a “cowardly” self which no one can admit 1

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude

to. To repudiate our own “cowardice,” we seek and find an adversary to vanquish. Every time we feel frightened, we infuse that fear with Heroes, Cowards, and Villains. We fill our world with conflicts, antagonisms, exhortations, and devaluations. Ordinary “problems in living” (Sullivan, 1953) become complicated. Cultural problems become inflamed. In our personal lives, we seek an analyst. As global citizens, we clamor for peace, even as we make war. As individuals and as collectives, we imagine the Hero as the antidote to our suffering. In this book, I will suggest that this fantasy exacerbates our suffering. I believe it turns the human condition into a cycle of trauma. It is a difficult world, and we all crave the Hero. When we feel endangered, we want immortality (Altman, 2005; Peltz, 2005). We all suffer from death anxiety (Becker, 1975; May, 1981; Yalom, 1980). We have a dread of helpless dependence (Klein, 1948/1975; Segal, 1964). We take flight from these experiences through illusion (Slochower, 2006), grandiosity (Kohut, 1966/1978a, 1972/1978b, 1984), and impulsivity. To enhance our sense of our own immortality, we imagine a Heroic figure of fearless rebellion (Slochower, 1970), resolute will (Arlow, 1961; Rank, 1922/2004), absolute autonomy (Rank, 1922/2004), superhuman endurance, and world-transformational powers (Campbell, 1949). This figure lives in moral absolutes and moral extremes (Alford, 1998). It tends to lack intimate attachment, even though it appears to act on behalf of the social world (Campbell, 1949; Rank, 2004; Reed, 1974). In its most magical form, this ideal can actually sponsor rash acts and noble deeds. These actions appear to us as a source of inspiration, and they provide a bulwark against our anxiety (Arlow, 1961). In these moments, the Hero appears as a figure of ecstatic goodness. This figure becomes the object of our adulation, excitement, and desire. But the more we study this mythic figure, the more we will see how it turns against us. Our apparent savior is embedded in a problematic relational system: The Hero is outsized because we are making ourselves small. This figure seems to be without need, because we are absorbing its need.* It seems autonomous, because we require illusions of autonomous selfhood (Gerson, 1996; Layton, 2004; Reed, 1974). It seems singular, because we have ceded all of our courage to a figure who appears to act alone. The Hero’s courage seems formidable, because it is opposed to a formidable Villain. In his discussion of Levinas, Rozmarin (2007) offers an eloquent *

In this book, the Hero will not be denoted by a masculine pronoun, even though this configuration is often phallic in its nature, and has been inscribed on a male body. Although my thesis will touch on gender, it is not a study in gender.



The Hero in the Mirror

3

description for this relation to other-ness: “It can serve as nothing but an empty location, a destination, for the subject of the discourse to store his fantasies of truth, salvation and doom” (p. 331). Through this idealized construct, we may assuage some anxiety. We may evoke some spectacular acts. But we also erect the “existential gulag” in which we are imprisoned (p. 337). We are locked into systems of intrapsychic, interpersonal,* and global conflict.† Our problems become urgent; they have dramatic pitch and fervor; they are imbued with near-death experience, and we inflict them on others. Nothing else seems to capture our attention. We fail to address the “ordinary” dilemmas of the human condition. We cannot find the “ordinary” hero in ourselves. In this book, I make a plea for this “ordinary hero.” I critique our visions of the Heroic and propose an alternate vision of courage: one which reflects the realities of human fear and human subjectivity. In my view, danger is endemic to the human condition. The most pedestrian problem can bewilder us and thrust us into states of existential isolation. Our challenge is to keep faith with the self, while we keep faith with the other. This requires a condition of interdependence and mutual reliance, in which the hero is us. In this context, the heroic is social, and courage is not the province of a singular Hero. Bravery is not defined by its antagonism with destructiveness, but by an awakened ability to meet human trouble. To move toward this position, we must confront our own anxiety. If we can admit to being mortal and insecure (Ensler, 2006), we might not defer to the Hero. We might stop waiting for that Hero to arrive. We would be less inclined toward rash action and more inclined toward reflectivity. We might ameliorate our shame and our paralysis. Perhaps we could seek hope in our own social world. To find this hope, “the urge for unlimited vastness and boundlessness, omniscience and eternity, must to some extent be overcome or transformed” (Aron, 2005, p. 693). Heroic Otherness and the Great Generation‡ The problem under study has psychological, cultural, and ethical dimensions. It takes different shapes in different social contexts. For me, this * † ‡

See Chapters 4, 6, 7. See Chapters 2, 3, 8, 9. I would like to dedicate this chapter to my father, Saul Grand. He told me his story, and encouraged me in this project.

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude

problem also has personal meaning. I never thought I had courage. I never knew if I would have it, if the time came. Or perhaps, I should say, when the time came. Given my heritage, persecution seemed inevitable. For a child, that was enough of a problem. But there was a greater one: How would I act, in dark times? By the time I was 7 years old, life was an incipient moral crisis. I can see myself, with my grandmother, skipping rope in Brooklyn. I am eating penny candy, in Greenwich Village. From the outside, I must have seemed like a child. But in my mind, I was tilting at fascism. Everywhere I looked, there were Heroes, Cowards, and Villains. This preoccupation grew out of a post–World War II (WWII) sensibility. As a child of the Great Generation, I was born into a riveting and disturbing worldview. Danger was imminent; life was a test of cowardice and courage. This vision was evoked by the war, and it was particular to that war. There had been an epic battle between good and evil, and the Heroes had won. Then they came home, put on suits and ties, went to work, and mowed the lawn. They looked like ordinary men. But they were objects of mystery, terror, and excitement. We would shudder to think about what they had seen. They barely spoke about the war. We never knew the soldiers inside of our fathers, and those soldiers were never known by their own children. But Nazism had made them larger than life. We were filled with their nobility and their sacrifice. But we were also filled with selfdoubt. Whatever they had done, we didn’t know if we could do it. But after WWII, you had to know that you could come up with the “stuff” (See also Harris, 2008). Bystanders and Rescuers: The Debt of Memory This conviction bore the imprint of mass trauma. It would be many years before I could query its traumatic origins and find another register for courage. I was born in 1952, shortly after the end of the war. Heroism was a prevailing motif in my culture. Cowardice evoked our condemnation. We had black and white moral codes, which were mirrored by the images on our black and white television. That’s where I saw the newsreels of the concentration camps. At the time, everyone was reckoning with the same shock. The truth had been hidden, and now it was our responsibility to see it. No one thought much about monitoring these images, or about their effects on a young child. In my memory, I am paralyzed, watching. I seem to be alone, and the images keep rolling. How old could



The Hero in the Mirror

5

I have been? Perhaps 3 or 4. Anyway, I knew who they were, and I also knew who we were. My father was an American Jewish soldier, who was stationed in Dachau just after its liberation. What he saw left a stain on his memory. I was born 7 years later. The newsreels simply confirmed what I already knew. In my family, Nazis were evil, but passive bystanders were not far behind them. Before I could crawl, I got the message: Violence was endemic to the human condition. It would come again, and there would be another victim. From infancy onward, I received a moral edict: I must act, on behalf of the innocent, when their time came. In my family, we knew who the devil was, and we were vigilant about his return. I was always worrying about how I would escape. I liked hidden spaces, trap doors, secret stairwells, and I wanted a cloak of invisibility. I watched for the exit. The Nazis weren’t dead; they were silent, and they could always come back. But I also knew that the devil would change his shape and his ideology. Persecution could happen anywhere, and it could be directed at someone else next time. Dachau wasn’t just about us. This time, we were it. But next time, someone else could be it. They might need us to rescue them. If someone needed our rescue, there must be no hesitation. If a culture of terror arose, we had to fight injustice. Regardless of the risk, we had to take it. Nothing could trump the protection of the innocent. Nothing could legitimate inaction. My moral universe was bounded by these three possibilities: perpetrator, bystander, victim. I never got to tangle with smaller ethical questions. I was walloped with the big one, from the first moment of speech. I decided pretty early that I wasn’t the perpetrator. I studied survival, in case I was the next victim. But if I wasn’t the next victim, who would I be? Someday, I would be tested. On that day, I would discover the worth of my soul. As a child, I thought I had to solve the problem of good and evil, before the next cataclysm. My mind was always full of Heroes and Villains. It was inevitable, perhaps, for me to become a psychoanalyst, studying the problems of malignance and destruction. With my heritage, I made the link between personal and political conflict, well before I read critical social theorists. But I was still knotted up about courage and cowardice. When I wasn’t witnessing my familial story, I was reading other stories. Thousands of books were cluttering our walls: Holocaust testimony, American history, world history, philosophy, literature, ethics, mysteries, fairy tales, cartoon books, contemporary politics. Newspapers and magazines were everywhere. I always had an affinity with psychology, but I never thought psychology was distinct from politics, literature, or

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude

history. Wherever a good story took me, that’s where I went. But in every story, I found a Hero. The Heroic Excites and Alienates Its Witness Every time I saw courageous action, that action took on the status of a heroic idealization. This action was as awesome as it was alien; I would never do it, when my time came. As a child, I was terrified, full of fantasy, full of history, and ethically challenged. My daily life was infused with noble aspirations. Bravery was imperative, and it was a matter of life and death. In that epoch, courage was defined as ecstatic goodness. It was bold action, taken on behalf of the other, without concern for self-preservation. It was the willingness to “die on one’s feet, rather than live on one’s knees.” Anything less would be cowardice. I was raised on stories of rescue and resistance. But I was also raised to flee and to hide. My Heroic prospects excited me, but they were also a source of bewilderment and confusion. How could I be fearless, when I was frightened? How could I be bold, if I was invisible? How could I save multitudes, when I was in hiding? I thought fear was the impediment to my heroic transformation. Everywhere I looked, the Hero seemed fearless. Everywhere I looked, the Hero was an object of adulation, celebration, and desire. His moral clarity seemed miraculous. I watched movies about the Great Generation. I saw my father protect victims of violence, on New York City streets. One night stands out in my memory. We were driving through midtown. It was dark and deserted. A man was attacking a woman on the sidewalk. My father leapt out of the car. He moved like lightning. His muscles rippled, and his outrage was formidable. He saved the innocent. In this moment, the demonic trinity was visible: perpetrator, bystander, victim. Then the bystander was activated. The rescuer appeared, and the malignant triangle was broken. Goodness won. Clark Kent turned into Superman. Heroic transformation was possible. Watching my father, I knew how we had won the war. I knew who had won it, and I knew which side I wanted to be on. In this moment, I was inspired by the bold action of the Heroic Other. One inspiration led to another, and I began a lifelong inquiry: Who was the “Hero,” and how could I become him? I never noticed the problematic core of my own question. I kept depositing courage in the Other. I thought courage was an essence.* I kept constructing the Heroic as a superhuman *

For a critique of this type of essentialism, see Layton (2004).



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figure of ecstatic goodness. This figure only came to life in an opposition with “evil.” I chased the secret of Heroic transformation, but that secret would only appear in the midst of destruction. In ordinary life, it was beyond the grasp of ordinary human subjectivity. I couldn’t see this knot, for a long time. Gazing at the “Hero,” my vision was constrained by cultural tropes. In my childhood, good and evil seemed like pure forms, and they were always at war. This war was terrible and exhilarating. In the Nazis, destruction had been magnified beyond the recognizable. Malignance, tragedy, and the meaning of salvation: Everything had an extraordinary dimension. Courage had to become larger than life. In daily life, my father was a man of ordinary goodness. He was generous, socially conscious, and he would help anyone. In Dachau, he must have done whatever he could. But whatever he did, it could never be enough. He was witnessing a paralytic and monstrous spectacle. In that moment, the Nazis made him into a set of eyes, just as I was made into a set of eyes by the newsreels. After Dachau, ordinary goodness must have seemed insufficient. When my father met crime on a dark street, he could intervene, while someone else was made into a set of eyes. Suddenly, Dachau was reversed: I was witnessing a Heroic spectacle. From the security of the car, I watched my father become larger than life. I saw him grow in size and in force; his body had otherworldly dimensions. His moral code was in precise correspondence to his action. He was miraculous, and he had x-ray vision. He arrived before the victim could be wounded. In this moment, his ordinary goodness was transformed into superhuman goodness; it conformed to my Heroic idealization. In the aftermath of massive trauma, concern and integrity had to be spectacular. Compassion had to vanquish destruction. That encounter had to be seen by watchful eyes. My eyes were a repetition of, and an antidote for, his eyes on Dachau. Watching him protect a woman on the street, tragedy was undone. We could stop thinking about the millions no one could save. But I knew terror could return. One person had been saved, but millions were lost. My father wouldn’t always be there. I couldn’t just admire him. I had to learn to be him. I needed to penetrate the mystery of his Heroic transformation, but I could never do it. I could only witness violence and confirm the Heroic Other. In this, I wasn’t alone. In post-war American culture, we were always gazing at the Hero. If our Hero had an interiority, we didn’t want to know about it. When cultures idealize a Hero, they don’t inquire into the interior of that Hero. If we inquire into the subjectivity of the Hero, that Hero tends to fall off of his pedestal (see Goren, 2007; Thomas, 2005). In post-war America, we wrote a script for our veterans, and we

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude

silenced any departure from this script. We didn’t want to know what our soldiers had suffered (see Fussell, 1989). We purged our veteran of fear, and need, and hesitation, so that bravery became an impossible construct. We were excited by the “strong,” and we had disdain for the “weak.” To claim strength, we had to assail “weakness” and “cowardice” wherever we found it (see Layton, 2004). Throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s, the Heroic was a mythic prescription. It was a spectacle. It obscured the tragic complication of the past. It inoculated us against future episodes of terror. Good triumphed over evil in war histories, combat movies, horror films, comic books, and detective fiction. Courage was sacrifice, on behalf of the other and for the “just cause.” Courage was a readiness to “go it alone”; a willingness to risk torture, dismemberment, or death. Before WWII, American culture valorized the “rugged individual.” In our cultural mythology, the cowboy had already “tamed” the “wild west.”* During the Great Depression, that cowboy was reformulated as the superhero. Superman and the Lone Ranger (see Wilner, 2005) came to our rescue. After WWII, we needed these figures more than ever. In 1950s America, Heroic transformation was personified by men. But after Dachau, I knew that girl-bodies were not exempt. In the cataclysm, I, too, would have to “stand up and be a man.” If I couldn’t take this risk, I might have a life, but I wouldn’t have a soul. How does a frightened person respond to this mandate? I had no answer to this problem. All I had was excitement and alienation. Instead of asking new questions, I kept searching for a Heroic phantasm to mimic. This phantasm extolled peace, but it was lit up by violence. It protected the vulnerable, but it was never vulnerable, and it had no need for the other’s help. Sometimes my Heroic phantasm was a conscious ego ideal. But it often operated subliminally, as the harsh superego in my “social unconscious” (Layton, 2006). It issued absurd directives, which I could never fulfill. This predicament was not restricted to my generation. We thought our fathers were Heroes. Our fathers often seemed to think the Hero was someone else: a liberator, or a resistance fighter, or a bomber pilot. After the war, my culture seemed locked into a one-way field of vision, in which the witness sees, while the courageous acts. There were veterans who felt heroic, but they never felt that anyone wanted to know what this experience was made of (Schimmel, personal communication, Oct. 8, 2002). For their heroics, there was no expanding human *

To “tame” the “wild west,” Native Americans were slaughtered. In the 1950s and 1960s, we sustained our Heroic mythology by obscuring this historical reality.



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relationship of mutual knowing. There was a relationship between a gaze and its object, in which the Heroic Other kept upstaging intimacy. When mutual knowing is upstaged by the Hero, heroic gestures are obscured. This knot trespassed on all of its participants.* Transcendent gestures appeared in this broken relational system, but they also contributed to the maintenance of this system. This was one of the perversities of that cultural epoch: Inspired acts actually obscured the realities of ordinary human courage. There was little room for nuance, complication, conversation, or inquiry. Our Hero functioned as a tantalizing object (see Fairbairn, 1952). It left us in a state of unfulfilled desire. To fulfill our desires, our antagonisms increased. To retain our inspiration and our excitement, we kept reconstituting a dangerous world of radical opponents (see Grand, 2008). In the decades after the war, our Heroes were increasingly lit up by destruction. In our “action movies,” the triumph of the Hero requires ecstatic bloodletting. If we miss the beginning of these movies, it is difficult to distinguish the opponents. We can’t tell which one is the Villain. In popular culture and in our political domain, our Hero has increasingly become a “demon lover of violence” (Morgan, 2001). Of course, this Hero is not a monolithic construct in American culture. It varies in response to family, subculture, time, and place. And it is certainly not unique to the United States. Heroic Other-ness takes myriad forms. In its disparate forms, the Heroic Other evokes noble deeds, and it promotes conflict. Across the globe, there are violent claims to Heroic purity, righteousness, and transcendence. These claims are culturally specific. Regardless of their culturally specific forms, I would argue that this Hero bears the residue of some cultural trauma; it is conjured as the antidote to that trauma. But when the Hero bears the residue of communal trauma, enfeebled self states will be obscured and assailed by defensive grandiosity (see Kohut, 1966/1978a, 1972/1978b, 1984). This will potentiate conflict and affect the way we greet human problems. It will increase the potential for some form of traumatic reenactment. These reenactments bleed through into our private lives and onto the political stage. In this way, the Heroic Other operates according to the principles of transgenerational historical transmission as they have been described by Laub and Auerhahn (1993) and Davoine and Gaudillière (2004). This transgenerational transmission *

For commentary on this type of subject-object split, see Aron (1996); Benjamin (1988, 1995); Butler (1990); Goren (2006); Grand (2008); Dimen (2003); Harris (2005); Layton (2004); Rozmarin (2007); Thomas (2005); and others mentioned throughout this book.

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took a particular form, after WWII, in my life and in the life of my country. But whenever we are in thrall to the Hero, we need to think about the way that trauma (individual, familial, collective) is shaping our vision of courage. The Hero in the Mirror In our personal lives and in our cultural rhetoric, we make claims for peace. To pursue peace, we need another framework for the heroic. What would this look like? Can we find a way to see “courage” without contextualizing “courage” in trauma and destruction? Is it possible to have a more subtle receptivity to human fear and human problems? Can we find the best in ourselves, without conjuring the worst in ourselves? Can we transfer awe to the I–Thou relationship? Can we infuse the I–Thou relationship with more constructive, flexible forms of idealization (see Kohut, 1966/1978a, 1972/1978b, 1984; Slochower, 2006)? Can we lift courage out of its marriage to destruction? Would this eliminate our excitement? Would it allow us to find more creative responses to danger? To ameliorate the pathology of the Hero, the hero must become us. To achieve this, we need to ask different questions and find another way to listen to the human story. In thinking about this possibility, I turn once again to my own childhood. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was caught in the predicament of my time. But I also participated in another form of conversation. This was a familial dialogue about ordinary human courage. I was the grandchild of Russian Jewish immigrants.* At dinner, there were rowdy contests between telling and listening. My extended family was irreverent, and it had a healthy skepticism about authority and reality. We had our favorite myths of triumph, which were displayed and admired, again and again. These myths were the object of reverence, but they were also the object of mockery. Our heroes always had feet of clay. They were poor immigrants, and it was their story which needed telling. In this dialogue, fear was not the impediment to heroic transformation. Fear lit up the small gestures of the “small hero,” it lit up the flaws in those heroes, and it evoked humanized ideals. It pointed backward toward traumatic history, but it also pointed forward, toward the challenges of ordinary living. *

The forthcoming stories involve fictionalized identities and events.



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This portrait of courage didn’t emerge in any linear form. It certainly didn’t emerge from a voice of authority. It had to be distilled from a series of disrupted conversations. In my family, stories were always losing their beginnings and endings. If you ever got to the middle, suddenly, the details would change. This left my family untroubled; they scoffed at anyone who was too preoccupied with the facts. If you listened long enough, you might emerge with some approximation of the “truth.” They would have made excellent critical theorists and terrible accountants. Commentary, context, interpretation, and elaboration: These were the important features of a story. Sometimes I thought they were writing their own Talmud. Or an epic novel with subplots. Wherever a story took off, it inevitably went somewhere else. What mattered was political, historical, cultural, and familial coloration. Nothing could be understood without reference to something else. With this Russian Jewish family, there was always something else. If you asked a question, there were passionate responses, but there was never a simple answer. Whatever question you thought you were asking, it led back to the complexities of courage. God forbid you asked for directions. They were immigrants, and they were preoccupied with departure and arrival. If you asked how to get to somewhere in Brooklyn, 5 relatives gave you 10 routes, and every landmark digressed into familial details. You turned left where Great Aunt Tessie once lived, with her first husband. No, someone would say, she lived there after he died. He didn’t die, someone would claim, it’s a scandal, he left her for someone else, and she had three children. “No, she didn’t, one of them was a niece that she took in. Remember Tessie’s sister, she died, it must have been cancer. So Tessie took little Esther in.” “Well, she wasn’t too bright, Tessie, she should have known he was a womanizer.” Eventually, the digression would return to the problem at hand. By now, they needed a reminder: Where are you trying to get to? Well, if you’re driving through Flatbush, you probably should turn right. If you turned right, you encountered Great Uncle Max, and you heard about the early twentieth century in Russia: pogroms, conscription, emigration to America. When I looked at Uncle Max, I saw a shriveled little man who spoke broken English. Apparently, he was young once, and he walked across Russia and made it to America. “No, he didn’t.” “Tell her, Max.” “Well,” he would say, “not exactly …” but he never got to finish. There was a stage whisper from the kitchen, “Ach. It’s a bubbameiseh.”* *

An old wives’ tale.

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And anyway, you should go through Queens, to avoid traffic. In my family, traffic was trouble. When things were really bad, we went through the Bronx. Just when things were going too far, there would be an eruption: “What are you, nuts? She’s going to Manhattan from Brooklyn.” Argumentation would die down, and then another relative came in. Every time there was a new arrival, they got cross-examined. How did you get here? When everyone converged in the same place, the first half hour was a competition about who had the best route. In this family, the best route never seemed to be the direct one. It was the ability to take a risk, think on your feet, distill advice, change direction, converse with strangers, adapt to unforeseen trouble, use whatever was at hand. In times of trouble, we needed to be flexible, adaptive, inventive. Leaving home, you might have to do this alone. But this capacity had been mapped by our forebears. When I was going anywhere, this conversation was maddening. But somehow, we always got where we were going. We were anxious, but we were also exhilarated by adventure. We had a dread of departures, separations, and dislocations. But we took delight in our moments of mastery and triumph. We anticipated trouble, but we could navigate the five boroughs with aplomb. Wherever we went, we knew that there were always alternate routes. If there was too much traffic, there were subways and buses and trains, and sometimes we even walked. Of course, these options were the subject of contention. Which subway should I take? Local or express? Elevated or underground? Change stations or walk across town? What about the weather, construction, train delays, getting stuck in tunnels? Isn’t it safer to get stuck on a bridge? Can you really walk in those shoes? What about a raincoat? Just when I’m ready to leave, an aunt calls out from the kitchen, “So. You’ll take a little stuffed cabbage.” What was I supposed to do with stuffed cabbage, on the C train? Of course, there is no food in America. You could starve along the way. Whatever journey I was making, it was thick with the impediments of history. But it was never static. My father never went the same way twice. He was always inventing another way to get there. Every journey involved the unforeseen, and it required improvisation. In my family, embarkation was a paradoxical experience. It entailed a certain risk. But, it was always an adventure. I left with hope, anxiety, bewilderment, and excitement. I left without any definitive source of guidance or authority. What I had was diverse perspectives, contradictory opinions, considered wisdom, and ridiculous advice. I had dread and freedom. I had my family’s delight in mastery and an acute sense of human frailty. I had learned how to read trouble, and I had learned how to read people. When I finally got my hand



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on the doorknob, my family would all yell, “Geh Gusendeheit.”* Would they ever see me again? I opened the door, and then I had to think for myself. I was alone, on subways, buses, and trains. I had to choose the right highway and decide which way to walk. But if I took the wrong turn, I knew how to turn to the “kindness of strangers.” Needless to say, I frequently got lost. But when I found my way, I was excited, and my family was excited for me. In these moments, we didn’t need destructiveness to excite us, and we didn’t need a villain to light up our heroics. Our courage was lit up by the human condition: by risk and danger, by mastery and fear. This dialogue taught me about heroic excitement. As Leighton (personal communication, April 14, 2008) would put it, I had a humanized ideal, which I could internalize.† This ideal was full of adventure and laughter, but it also had a dark edge. We were, after all, Russian Jews; my great-grandparents had fled from pogroms. Our dinner conversation was rowdy, but it took place after the Holocaust. We certainly knew about the realities of destructiveness. In the course of a few hours, everything would collide at our table: Yiddish and English; weddings and funerals; distant relatives and new babies; the latest mysteries and movies; pogroms, immigration, and genocide; lynching, racial persecution, civil rights marches, and the Vietnam War; the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the midst of all this telling, a single tragedy would emerge. A hush would fall across the table. This silence always referred to a moment when humanity had lost its reverence for human life. When a Russian Jewish family falls silent, a child knows that something is serious. Through these silences, my family remembered those who would never “arrive.” I had big ears, big questions, and a riotous imagination. Sitting at the table, I kept listening for the key to my Heroic transformation. Instead of finding the key to Heroic transformation, I learned a lot about ordinary courage. Still, I wanted to know who the Heroes really were so that I could grow up and be one. Familial relations had kept this prospect alive, but they also cast doubt on the Heroic Other. In the expanding back story of family, politics, history, and culture, there was no singular “Hero.” And there was no singular form of heroic action. In trouble, we needed to improvise. We weren’t constrained by what the Hero would do. Watching my father rescue a crime victim, Clark Kent turned into Superman. Listening to my family, Superman kept turning back into Clark Kent. Wearing glasses, stripped of his cape—this didn’t make Clark * †

Go in good health, if you must. For more on this solution, see also Kohut, 1966/1978a, 1972/1978b.

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into a nebbish.* It just made him more like us. We knew that the world was daunting, ridiculous, and tragic. Sometimes you arrived, and sometimes you didn’t. Sometimes you felt muscular, and sometimes you were impotent. We were familiar with grief, and struggle, and the nature of despair. We memorialized those who didn’t make it, and we did what we could to help others “arrive.” I will always remember those conversations: their clamor, their humor, and their silences. In my family, the Hero kept coming undone. But something else remained. What remained was human courage and human reverence: the “small” gestures of the poor, the dislocated, and the disenfranchised. These stories were of us, and they were for all of us; they linked human fortitude to human tragedy. Methodology: Storytelling and Story Listening If my heritage weighed me down with Heroic idealizations, it also suggested an exit from those idealizations. At that dinner table, I learned that wisdom arrives through human stories, and that one human story always implicates, and complicates, another. Before I became a psychoanalyst, thought about transgenerational transmission (Grand, 2000), or read Laub and Auerhahn (1993) or Davoine and Gaudillière (2004), I knew that personality was linked to familial history and that familial history is inseparable from the history of politics and culture. Danger, tragedy, and the ecstatic aspect of ordinary goodness: These are social phenomena, and they belong to all of us. The Hero is a theatrical construction. It is a performance staged for a passive witness. This performance dissolves in dialogic storytelling. Once it dissolves, we can see real human courage. Now we embark on our own journey. We step inside the circle of anxiety and take the hand of a very human other. To find the hero in the mirror, we must examine the stories we tell about courage. Through this autobiographical sketch, I have offered my readers two types of stories, each of which constructs a different vision of the heroic. The first looks at the Heroic Other. The second is a flawed human dialogue, in which the hero can become us. In this book, I want to elucidate these modes of storytelling. I want to trace the ways that we create them and the ways that we move between them. Throughout, I keep reiterating these questions: What is courage? Where do we find it? How is it constituted by differing relational *

A nothing.



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systems? Can we lift it out of its marriage to destruction? Can we link courage to empathy, mutuality, and ethical inquiry? Can we transfer excitement to ordinary goodness? I ask these questions in clinical and cultural contexts. I keep faith with my heritage and draw on history, literature, politics, social criticism, news media, child development, and psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalysis, I largely hew to relational theory, interpersonal theory, and British object relations. My efforts to link trauma with Heroic mythology is grounded in the work of Dori Laub.* My attempt to entwine psyche, family, and culture owes a considerable debt to Layton’s (2004, 2006) postmodern lens on gender, although this is not a study in gender. My critical perspective about Heroic idealization is indebted to Kohut’s body of work and to Slochower’s (2006) study of illusion. In this investigation, I also have a developmental preoccupation. I wonder how Heroic forms grow and change as we shift into “maturity.” I think that adults often lose the elastic quality of childhood imagination. I have the feeling that this constricts our heroic capacities and makes us objectify the Hero. As a result, we enact the dangers which children play with. These enactments can reach destructive extremes—in our private lives and on the global stage. In the search for the hero in the mirror, I want to listen to what latency-age children can tell adults about the problem of the Heroic Other. I do this with a sparse knowledge of development literature. Throughout this book, I dip into other disciplines. I shudder to think about the gaping holes in my knowledge and the relevant references I’ll leave out. My reading habits have never been comprehensive or systematic. I tend to go wherever a good story takes me. Heroic Chronicles and Activist Narratives As I try to find the wisdom in human stories, I must confess my bias. The Heroic Other makes for a gripping tale, but I wouldn’t call it a “good story.” For me, a good story is bewildering; it is mind-bending. It has the effect of undoing preconceptions, and it opens up new questions. At the end, I’m not the same person I was at the beginning. My worldview has deepened, and sometimes it has been turned upside down. In the tale of the Heroic Other, there are formidable opponents, impossible predicaments, inspired acts, and near-death debacles. The Hero’s form is always *

See Laub (1992); Laub and Auerhahn (1993); Laub and Podell (1995); Laub (1995).

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morphing, but the story arc is not. These tales fill us with excitement and dread. But they have a laser-like trajectory, an ending which is predictable at the beginning. In my view, these tales are what Meares (1998) would describe as a chronicle. According to Meares, there are two modes of storytelling which become modes of living. In his work, Meares contrasts the chronicle and the narrative forms; he traces the way these forms shape our lives. The chronicle is prenarrational. It is primitive, linear, reactive, redundant, impoverished in metaphor, and lacking in reflectivity, symbolic capacity, and intersubjectivity. It lacks freedom, and it is not really authored by an agentic self. To me, this is an apt description of our Heroic mythology. Heroic mythology extols the Hero’s capacity for transformation, but these stories are actually the antithesis of change. They cannot really alter the voice which is telling the tale, and they cannot really alter their recipient. When we transmit Heroic mythology, this is not a mutually informed experience. Rather, this transmission re-creates a relationship between a gaze and its object. This recycles a faulty idealization, so that our vision of courage oscillates between an enfeebled self and a grandiose solution (see Kohut, 1966/1978a, 1972/1978b; also Leighton, personal communication, April 14, 2008). By contrast, Meares describes the narrative form and the narrative mode of living: This story is complex, nuanced, fluid, evolving, reflective. It is authored by an agentic self; it is constructed in relationship to the inner and outer worlds. It is in a continual state of flux. It is a story told with an other. It is informed by dialogue, and it adapts to that dialogue. From my perspective, the narrative would construct humanized ideals, which can respond to unforeseen dangers. In my view, this narrative form can reveal and facilitate real human courage. In making this distinction between two kinds of stories, Meares’s perspective is foundational to my method. As I sift through our heroic knots, I am interested in the evolution of the activist narrative. In the activist narrative, the Heroic chronicle is critiqued and cast into doubt. In this process, the heroic truly becomes the champion not of things become but of things becoming … The hero-deed is a continuous shattering of the crystallizations of the moment … [it] focuses on the growing point … the hero is the champion of creative life. (Campbell, 1949, p. 337)

When growth actually occurs within a narrative, storytelling becomes a dialogic and fluid exchange. This exchange liberates the multiform capacities of multiple selves and multiple “like subjects” (Benjamin, 1995).



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Because it is shaped by disparate voices and perspectives, the activist narrative can be uncomfortable and ambiguous; but it will spark our imagination and our creativity (see also Orfanos, 2006, on Greek myth). It allows us to author our responses to danger. It encourages us to change and to act as agents of change. It allows the other to change us. In the activist narrative, the subject-in-fear finds unexpected social links. These links are found because we have queried received Heroic tropes, widened our circle of empathy, and developed our integrity. To meet danger with flexibility, resourcefulness, integrity, and adaptability: This is the task of the hero in the mirror. To find that capacity in ourselves, we must listen to the way we recycle our own myths of the Heroic Other. As citizens and as clinicians, we need to query our own stories. Are we reinforcing a Heroic chronicle? Are we co-creating an activist narrative? How can we tell the difference, when we are in it? Transformation and Transfiguration It is always difficult to tell the difference, while we are in it. Still, chronicles and narratives have many distinguishing features, some of which I have already described. But there is one which will become a leitmotif of this book: the distinction between Heroic transformation and what I call heroic transfiguration. In our mythologies of the Hero, a human figure acquires a superhuman shape and transcends fear. In the United States, this transformation has an iconic representation: Clark Kent turns into Superman. We have many versions of this process. In my view, this is a seductive portrait of change, which cannot illuminate real human courage. In the Heroic chronicle, the Heroic body morphs toward superhuman forms of self-reliance. In these imagoes, courage appears as an autonomous essence; it is the antithesis of need and interdependence. This is a grandiose solution to human vulnerability. It inspires us, but it is not really accessible to flawed human subjects. It is not a relational process, and it cannot be co-created. Either you can morph into a bold and fearless figure, or you can’t. Either you have it, or you don’t. To construct real narratives of human courage, I think we need a different vision of heroic growth and change: that of heroic transfiguration. In heroic transfiguration, we are altered by the reality of fear. Strange things happen to us. We have encounters with strangers, and we assume strange postures and positions. Courage is not an essence, it is a relational process. When fear is transfiguring us in a relational field, we are more vulnerable

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and interdependent. But we are also more plastic. Our heroic possibilities are not dictated, or constrained, by Heroic conventions. They are a response to the immediacy of danger. These responses are formed in a variety of self–other configurations, which are reshaping us here, now. In heroic transfiguration, courage is flawed, but it also takes multiple forms. Courage is not the possession of a singular Hero, and it is not singular in its manifestation. Bravery is an interactive form of shape-shifting, which is not defined by idealization and diminishment. Superman isn’t valorized, and Clark isn’t useless. Instead the heroic body becomes something which Harris (2005) has described as “softly assembled”: protean, multiple, infinitely varied. It can appear as the marginal, the small, and the nervous. But wherever transfiguration appears, there is, as Harris puts it, a suggestion of an “imaginary potential world” (p. 35). In this potential world, goodness can excite us, without being lit up by violence. The Current Study I write this book as a clinician and as a citizen. I am motivated by clinical dilemmas and by urgent times. As a psychologist, I have been inspired by my patients, and I have been transfigured by fear. As citizens, we all live in an epoch of dehumanization, brutality, and economic instability. There are war refugees, and climate refugees, and an escalating cycle of homelessness and starvation. Genocide persists, and terrorism is spreading. Whole communities are wiped out by earthquakes and by storms. We don’t even know which land masses will remain after the ocean rises. All too often, the powerful lack concern, and the empathic seem disempowered. As a result, the vulnerable are frequently humiliated and abandoned. If we don’t mobilize our own courage, we may not have a planet to live on. Beginning with Freud (1915/1963) and continuing through interpersonal, relational, Freudian, and self psychology, psychoanalysis has a venerable history of social and political consciousness. Many of us are continuing this tradition. We have pursued a better society through social activism and cultural critique* and by assuming that every patient can develop more agency and concern. By studying our Heroic affliction, I hope to contribute to this effort. In my dialogue with my reader, I want to consider this: that the heroic is a life-altering, life-affirming function, which can answer danger, without turning danger into destructiveness. *

These colleagues will be acknowledged throughout this book.



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The Contents of This Book This book is a series of meditations on Heroic convention and the quest for heroic transfiguration. In every chapter of this book, human beings are reckoning with danger. Heroic chronicles are disassembled, and activist narratives are co-constructed. Whenever the Heroic chronicle appears in these essays, its personification will be demarcated as the “Hero.” Whenever an activist narrative is being formulated, it will be personified as a “hero” or as “heroes.” The upper case “Hero” is intended to convey idealization, distance, and objectification. The lower case “hero” refers to the real, human us. To find the hero in the mirror, people test their own moral codes against real human trouble. They reach across difference and find the other. They find their own resourcefulness and integrity. They resist injustice; they rescue others; they locate their own fortitude, creativity, and resilience. They rely on the strengths of others. These capacities are often complicated by the exhortations of the Heroic chronicle. There is a struggle with shame, contempt, and devaluation, and a recurrent collapse into some form of “combat.” Sometimes that combat is intrapsychic, metaphoric, interpersonal. But all too often, it becomes real. This book begins with the moment when combat turns real. In Chapters 2 and 3, a combat soldier seeks treatment with a civilian–analyst. That conversation opens up other conversations between civilians and soldiers. In this process, our Heroic mythologies are tested, and transfigured, by each other. Together, we see into the war zone and discover the ordinary hero in that war zone. In Chapters 4 and 5, I move into imaginary forms of contest, which exist in the minds of young children. How do they conjure the Heroic Other; how do they imagine heroic transfiguration? Do they become “sick” from our Heroic myths? What can they teach adults about the hero in the mirror? In Chapters 6 and 7, my focus shifts to adult treatment. Chapter 6 examines the Heroic Other as it occupies the analyst’s mind. This is a story of false courage in the analyst, in which the analytic ideal (see Slochower, 2006) is the object of the analyst’s deference. My integrity fails, and the hero in the mirror never comes to life. In Chapter 7, an adult trauma patient enters psychoanalysis. Here, the participants act upon each other as “intrepid subjects,” who “rescue” the lost familial figures from the patient’s past. This rescue effort has its parallel within the analysis, as the dyad restores the analyst’s “heroic self,” which had “died” in the analysis described in the previous chapter. Finally, in Chapters 8

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and 9, I look at the Heroic Other as it makes its appearance in mass violence. I examine terrorism, counterterrorism, genocide, and state terror. How are our Hero myths encoded in these forms of violence? How do resistance narratives read and decode the Demonic Hero? How do they restore dignity to the abject?

Section I Heroes and Warriors All too often, we turn our mythic Heroes into Warriors. We prosecute foreign wars and split our populace into soldiers and civilians. As civilians, we stay at home. We send our children off to fight and die. We exhort our soldiers’ Courage, we praise their battles, and we idealize their patriotic sacrifice. At the “home front” we imagine the combat zone, and we obscure the combat zone, and we never know the reality of war. We keep our soldiers silent. We never step inside battle, and we never enter the wounded body. We never really know the soldier who kills. In this state of alienation, we reinforce the civilian–soldier divide. When a populace accedes to this divide, warfare finds its permit in our Heroic mythologies. Our governments will press another foreign war. As citizens, we will clamor for peace, but combat will appear as an endless cycle. To break this cycle, we must cross the divide between civilians and soldiers. Soldiers must testify to the reality of combat and enter into a dialogue with civilians. In Chapters 2 and 3, soldiers resist the Heroic mythologies of civilians. They speak the truth of combat. They repossess their own bodies, and they redefine their own courage. In these chapters, civilians, too, act as ordinary war heroes. They relinquish blindness and innocence; they enter into a dialogue with violence; and they share the soldier’s tragic guilt. This study proceeds through the analysis of Peter: a decorated war hero, who saved lives and commissioned an atrocity, in Vietnam. Throughout these two chapters, Peter’s story opens up into other stories of combat. Soldiers speak, and civilians listen.

2 Combat Speaks I Heroic Performance and Civilian Desire*

Peter has an unquestioned identity as a War Hero. Now in his 60s, he stands naked before his mirror. He gazes at his battle scars. Wrinkles, gray hair, withered muscles disappear. Each morning, in the mirror, a golden warrior awakens to look upon himself. And then a good officer moves out among men. A year after arriving in Vietnam, he ordered the firebombing of a village. His orders set mothers and children and infants on fire. While he watched. While he, himself, shot the elderly and the unarmed. There is some sadness about the burning of children. But his soldiering is always told with a quiet, prideful gravitas. To a civilian who knows nothing. Who was protesting the war when he was fighting it. Conditions were chaos. He was fighting for American freedom. It was guerilla war; the enemy was everywhere. There was nothing for it but a scorched earth. For a few months after the firebombing, his troops blew up tunnels; they were hit by snipers, they were killed by land mines. He risked his life to save the lives of his men, until he was blown up. He was hospitalized for months and received both medals and scars. He lost his right foot and part of his right leg. He had a prosthesis, phantom pain, and a crutch. Athletic discipline restored his ability to walk. For Peter, movement is will. Will is his Heroic now, as it was then. Since his return from Vietnam, he has been a guiltless man of modest desires. He pursued what he wanted, and what he wanted, he got: business success, home, wife, children, grandchildren. Now he wants a retirement full with love and health and ease and prosperity. “Golden” years, which move easily backward and forward through time. But this wish is disrupted by the coldness of his wife. What *

Portions of this chapter were previously published in Grand, S. (2007). Maternal surveillance: Disrupting the rhetoric of war. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 12, 305-322.

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he wants is to make her desire him again. Peter adores his wife, he wants to be adored, and he is made anxious by her coldness. Throughout most of his marriage, his wife wanted him. The scars on his torso were intoxicating; they were the shared site of lust. At the dinner table, he told, and retold, the story of his medals. But in this family, Peter’s prosthesis did not exist. No one looked at his right leg, and no one really looked at his soul. Pain, infections, doctor visits, forms, veteran benefits, arthritis, worn-out prostheses: He managed these alone. She had never even touched him “there.” His sons never saw him undressed below the waist. When I ask Peter about this, I see his blankness and his surprise. No one has ever really “touched” him “there,” and Peter has never really looked at himself “there.” Thirty-five years ago, Peter was a teenager and a conscript. He was unprotected, indoctrinated against his own need and tenderness and desire for safety (see Shatan, 1977, 1982). He was cast out from civilized shelter. Then he was let down by his commanders, who had lost their own considered judgment (see Lifton, 2005). Parentless, he was attached to his “band of brothers.” Then he was forced to see, and smell, and hear all the ways that their bodies could disintegrate. Forbidden to mourn (see Lifton, 2005; Shatan 1982), motherless, fatherless, nearly objectless under fire, he still wanted desperately to be for the right and the good. He risked his life for his men. But he also became the agent of a “free fire zone.” In the chaos of combat, he didn’t know, anymore, who or what or when to kill. He didn’t know who was the enemy and who was innocent. The “just war” merged with his war crimes (see Caputo, 1977; Shay 1994). Then he was wounded, he was a war hero, and he reentered “civilization.” He learned how to tell his story to civilians. But he has never recognized the “unanchored dead who continue to hover” in the ambiguities of victory and defeat (Shay, 1994, p. 7). And he has never mourned the dead boy inside of himself. He has never looked at his own children and seen those other children. He has secured himself from tragic guilt (see Lifton, 2005; Straker, 2007). In his marriage, he sealed himself up, but he did this for her, and he did this with her. For this couple, combat was display and contrivance. Their arousal was a condition of blindness. They gazed at each other, but that gaze never became vision. For Peter and his wife, looking was not an ever-deepening sight, which sees into human suffering, difference, ambivalence, and complication. In this marriage, looking confirmed Heroic mythologies. Peter’s real body limped, but his war story did not. His wife wanted to have him, and his sons wanted to be him. This



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arrangement obscured a “deadened inner state (of) static guilt and fear of disintegration” (Lifton, 2005, p. 151). For Peter, life became a seamless procedural. He left violence in Vietnam. But he never left the magic of its intoxication (see Hedges, 2002). This system seemed seamless, for many years. Now, there was a mysterious rupture in his constellation of desire. Somehow, his “mirror” has been “cracked.” When Peter arrives in treatment, he cannot think about the meaning of this rupture. He can only ask for the restoration of the mirror. He has no register for two-way vision. He cannot imagine his wife touching his leg. And he cannot imagine grieving for the “unanchored dead” (Shay, 1994) who dwell inside of him. He cannot provide a dual eulogy for these children: the one in the soldier who killed, and the other, whom the soldier has killed. If Peter allowed himself to be seen, he might also see how he has affected the human family: his own and those of his victims. This is a very difficult journey for an old veteran. To make this journey, he needs an I–Thou relationship with his civilian analyst. But Peter and I are prisoners of our culture: As civilian and soldier, we have no template for an I–Thou conversation. Listening to Combat From the Home Front When nations prosecute foreign wars, civilians’ lives are transacted far from the war zone. This constructs an experiential distance between combatants and the “home front.” When soldiers come home on leave, when veterans return, civilians and soldiers don’t converse about what really happens in the war zone. Lives meld, intimacies form, but they are grounded in silence and alienation. For me, this distance was illuminated by Peter. Peter’s life was informed by the war he had seen. Mine was informed by two wars which I had never seen: World War II (WWII) and Vietnam. I had never lived in the war zone, and he had lived with memories of combat. Nothing had prepared me for this conversation. Peter’s bravery under fire, his war crimes, his marital problem, the redundancy of his story, and his construction of desire: I didn’t know how to greet these communications. I didn’t know if combat would speak to me, and I didn’t know if I could listen (for Peter’s complete analysis, see Chapter 3). Here in the United States, most psychotherapists don’t come from military families. We have never been in the military, and we have never lived in a war zone. We are more like Peter’s wife than we might like to admit. We know nothing about his war wound: neither the wound he has

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude

inflicted, nor the wound that he has suffered. As the war in Iraq moves into its seventh year, civilian therapists are providing mental health care to our veterans. How do we help someone like Peter? What do we know about his “unanchored dead”? What do we know of a man who saves men and firebombs the innocent? Secure on the “home front,” we have seen only what our culture has allowed into view. At various times, we may idealize our war heroes, or we may be appalled by the soldier’s war crimes. We may think we are looking at Peter. But all too often, we are seeing our own phantasms, reflected in the soldier. To begin our therapeutic work, we must admit our ignorance, and study the gap which exists between soldiers and civilians. In this process we may become able to listen to Peter. When we are listening, he may begin to speak. As we begin to know the war hero, we also reconceive that war hero, and we can help him reconceive himself. In this process, we destabilize the Heroic myths which facilitate war. Civilian Desire and Heroic Performance: A Clinical and Cultural Problem Peter’s problem is particular and unique. But it is also prevalent, in some form, for many soldiers who have fought in foreign wars. When nations prosecute foreign wars, they often conjure an eroticized distance between soldiers and civilians. Brutality and silence; loneliness, blindness, and seduction; the alienated discourse of civilian and soldier: These are endemic to our geopolitics. When the war zone is at a considerable geographic distance from the home front, the home front is at a considerable psychic distance from combat. This gap is readily filled with Heroic phantasms. Polemics easily eclipse human suffering and incite us toward violence. We send our children off to fight and die, and we have them kill other people’s children. We are assured that we will never see it. Our vista of war is occluded by geographic, psychic, and polemic distance (see Sontag, 1997, on war photography). Upon the soldier’s return, our culture prohibits real conversation between civilians and soldiers, even as it fuels our excitement about our soldiers. Civilian excitement enhances Heroic mythologies; it foments violence, it increases alienation, and it continues to eclipse human suffering. Soldiers don’t tell civilians what they have really seen or what they have really done. Civilians are sated by exciting stories, but they don’t ask soldiers what combat is really like. In our families and in our communal systems, we install this silence. Once this silence has been installed



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and eroticized, the war machine is in perpetual motion. Civilian desire will entice Heroic performance; Heroic performance will have intercourse with civilian desire. Another child will go to war, and another child will be born into the war zone. In my view, Peter is enacting this predicament. His quandary is personal, compelling, and particular. But it is also a referent to other lives, which are extinguished, outside of civilian sight. In this chapter, Peter’s story opens into other stories, which are told to civilians by other veterans. In these stories, soldiers do what Peter has never done. They impose the war wound on civilian imagination. They negate themselves as Heroic objects, they subtract themselves from civilian desire, and they facilitate the I–Thou relationship. In Chapter 3, I return to Peter’s analysis. In his analysis, we reconstitute the Heroic constellation of desire. Then our mirror cracks in unexpected ways. Together, we discover that “force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second, it crushes, the first it intoxicates” (Weil, 1940 p. 111). We would not achieve this without experiencing, and challenging, those forms of Heroic idealization which war both precipitates and relies on: Idealization is a distortion of realities and a dangerous stance, since it is invariably accompanied by splitting and projection—idealizing oneself and one’s ideas or groups’ at the expense of paranoid attitudes towards others. Having ideals is very different: it is not pathological to hope for a better future, for instance, for peace, and to strive for it, whilst recognizing how hard it is to attain and that the opposition to it comes not only from others but also has its roots in ourselves. (Segal, 1995, p. 204)

As Segal would suggest, the shift from idealization to ideals cannot occur, alone, in the soldier. It has to occur in the civilians who co-construct his narrative. We, at home, cannot live, exclusively, in the “home front.” We must communalize combat (see Shay, 1994), so that combat can infiltrate our ignorance. We must assume a shared culpability for the atrocity-producing situation (Lifton, 2005). The anti-war analyst, like me, cannot stand outside this disturbing interpenetration. We cannot idealize our pacifist principles and demonize the bestiality of soldiers. No army goes to war without civilian desire. The pacifist hope, of course, is to end all wars by changing the preconditions which lead to armed conflict. But while we examine the social-political-economic conditions which produce armed conflict, we should not exempt our own disavowed aggression and lust. As psychoanalyst Ernest Jones (1915) suggests, pacifists should be “chary of nostrums” and “brave

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude

enough to suspend their judgment until the painful process of attaining truth is achieved” (p. 57). In the present context, I take this to mean that civilian–analysts can contribute to the occlusion of the war zone. We do this through a solipsistic look into our own mirror. In an insular turn toward moral sanctimony. In an unwillingness to know the subjectivity of soldiering. In this chapter, I am suggesting this: If we want to inscribe pacifist hope on combat, we must assist in soldiers’ exposure of the war zone. If we want to analyze the soldier, we must first heed their analysis of our civilian desire. Refusing the Performance of Civilian Desire Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive—so wisdom wisheth us; she is a woman, and ever loveth only a warrior. (Nietzsche, 1885/1963, p. 46)

During and after war, the soldier is often an object of civilian desire. A prisoner to our imagination, he must be brave, muscular in soul and body. Romantic and stoical on leave, steadfast about returning to war, modest in decoration, he must be understated on discharge. Adaptable to civilian life, he tells a few tales, abbreviating chaos, so that the war coheres for us into an exciting story. For those who have remained at the “home front,” this presentation offers us a confirmatory response for sending our children off to fight and die. In this discourse, the veteran titillates our aggression, our death anxiety, and our collective triumph over that anxiety. He signifies everything within us that is deadly, split off, disavowed, or deferred. Uncivilized and noble, he is what we want to have and what we want to be. In this projection, there is a twinning of pride and loss, which is nested in a gender-polarized, heterosexual arrangement of the masculine and the feminine.* So that, for the woman at home, he ignites romantic love; for a boy, he ignites Heroic anticipation. In this constellation of desire, there is a limitless production of soldiers. And then another soldier becomes captive to this idealization. In contemporary warfare, women have entered combat. We see this in America in the war in Iraq. In this chapter, however, the soldier is denoted *

Here, human attributes are split and idealized along gender lines, as Benjamin (1988), Layton (2006), and others describe. So that soldiers possess agency, and aggression, and civilians possess emotional vulnerability and relational capacity. This split finds extreme forms in historical images of the “man at war” and the “woman at home.”



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as he and the civilian at home is denoted as she. This arrangement of pronouns reflects the historic predominance of male soldiers in combat and the ways that sexism has made these men unknowable. But I am also elucidating a constellation of desire which relies on, and recycles, a problematic erotic arrangement. This is a cultural trope, which establishes the combat soldier as phallic. The civilian becomes either the woman at home or the boy waiting to go to war. This is a heterosexual, gendered discourse, in which the soldier is the locus of both identificatory and object love for the civilian. In the war in Iraq, female bodies sometimes fight in the war zone, and male bodies wait at the home front. But there is still an unknowable gap between the phallic soldier and his “loved one at home.” There is still a boy who is going to “join up.” For this boy, there is a possibility of coming to know the soldier when it is already too late. In modern times, the gap between civilian and soldier morphs; it continues; it incites desire, and reproduces loneliness.* In this system the only form of “mutual recognition” (Benjamin, 1988) between “like subjects” (Benjamin, 1995) occurs between men† in combat. The I–Thou relation only appears between soldiers, in the war zone. But this I–Thou relation becomes a sequestered, homoerotic field between manly men.‡ For combat soldiers, male-bonding is the only real form of intimacy. But the erotic component of this love is still taboo, prohibited, and repudiated.§ To be a manly man, one must have a sexual life. In the combat zone, sex and romance can be addressed only to the woman at home. And so, Eros is dramatized, fantasy-laden, and overheated. It tends to be alienated, performative, and infused with distance and silence. It operates according to the law of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Combat soldiers rarely tell the truth to their loved ones at home, and their loves ones at home rarely ask for the truth of combat. Desire readily * †

‡

§

Communication technology will have an interesting effect on this arrangement, as “combat speaks” with greater immediacy, from the war zone. In modern times, this intimacy is occurring between phallic bodies, which can be sexed either male or female—but in military discourse, we could argue that the love which obtains between these bodies continues to be homo-erotic. In any war that separates combat soldiers from the domestic universe of the home front, there will be someone waiting at home (actually, an entire populace) who addresses the soldier through civilian loss and desire. One can speculate that if the soldier is female, the “woman at home” could be parents, a partner who is not going to join up, etc. I would suggest that an important feature of this split between civilian and solider is a hetero-sexual idealization, regardless of their sexed body. This has, and has not, changed in contemporary American military arrangements. Gay soldiers can be unknowably present under the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But any open expression of homosexuality is grounds for discharge. Witnessing the intense love between soldiers, the new recruit (gay or straight) draws nearer to what he cannot have.

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude

becomes ritualized. It occurs in conditions of loneliness,* and it obscures the realities of war. At various times, some of our soldiers have had the courage to protest this arrangement. The Warrior–Hero formulates a protest: He repudiates our idealized fictions and disassembles himself as a “manly” construction. He exposes the latent violence of civilian desire, and he negates that desire. He does what Peter has never conceived of. Instead of perpetuating an empty ritual, he imposes the war wound on our imagination. In this gesture, he acts like John Kerry’s “winter soldier” (see Goodman, 2004). In 1971, decorated Vietnam War heroes told the truth about the war zone. Testifying before Congress, they returned their medals and reconceived the war hero. It was a stunning moment in American history. Civilian blindness became vision, and the foundational myths of war were destabilized. In this chapter, I examine the narratives in which the war hero disassembles himself and subtracts his performance from our desire. In these narratives, the war wound becomes a conduit to perception. In Chapter 3, I return to Peter. How does the war chronicle crack, when the war hero cannot subtract himself from civilian desire? Combat Speaks: Narratives of Exposure During World War I (WWI), Siegfried Sassoon became a war hero, and he became a hero of war resistance.† His poetry exposed the erotic arrangements of combat and parsed their homoerotic and heteroerotic features. From his perspective in the war zone, we hear about the emptiness of civilian desire, its utter absence of I–Thou relatedness. We also hear about the bifurcated pathway of that desire: the way civilians want to be what they cannot have, and the way civilians want to have what they cannot be. As I read Sassoon’s poetry, there is a boy–man at home, who wants to be the soldier whom he cannot have. And there is a woman at home, who can only want to have the soldier, whom she cannot be. Sassoon’s world seems to be one of gendered splitting, disavowed longings, sacrificial prohibitions, and lethal prescriptions. Woman couldn’t own her own aggres*

†

It will be interesting to see what happens to this discourse now that women and men fight and die together. It will also be interesting to see what happens, now that soldiers and civilians have more direct contact from the war zone, through cell phones and e-mail. For a biographical description of Sassoon during the war years, and a contextual analysis of his war poetry, see Wilson (2004).



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sion, and man couldn’t own his erotic love for a man. In many ways, our culture has evolved since Sassoon fought in the trenches. But the same phenomena come alive in Peter’s treatment. To understand this, let us assume Sassoon’s perspective. In his poetry, gendered splitting and denial seemed to precipitate a dangerous lust. This lust sent men into combat and hollowed out the soldier whom civilians claimed to love. Thus, the woman at home forsakes someone who is already forsaken in violence: You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace. You make us shells … You can’t believe that British troops “retire” When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood “Glory of Women” (1983, p. 100)

In this text, Sassoon addresses feminine illusion, and he commands woman to look at what she will not see. Perhaps because he was a lover of men; perhaps because he knew, and seemed to love, the men in his charge (see Wilson, 2004), Sassoon could expose the false gender categories which articulate war’s “noble” romance. In Sassoon’s poetry, men are not tough and women are not the more sensitive sex. The woman at home may have thought war was mad, but, in his view, she seemed mad for the soldier’s Heroics. In 1917, women were restricted to domesticity; they could not seek adventure, or go into any kind of action. Faced with war, they often tried to keep men “safe home.” But perhaps they also required (and envied) a male surrogate “in action.” So that a woman could have what she could not be. One can imagine the ambivalent communications this wrought and the toll these communications took on Sassoon’s men. Throughout the history of warfare, women have lived desperate lives in, and far away from, the front (for an excellent description, see, e.g., Remarque, 1928). Dorothy Plowman’s WWI poem would certainly contest Sassoon’s vision of the woman at home. Upon her husband’s departure, Plowman writes, Listen: going up the street The echo of my soldier’s feet. A sound already growing dim Is all I now can hold of him In this wide world that thinning sound— …

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude Is all the wealth I still possess, My dwindling store of loveliness, An ebbing tide, a fading ghost, Poor wraith of all I cherish most. “Any Soldier’s Wife” (1917, p. 16)

Plowman doesn’t seem to thirst for her husband’s medals; what she wants is his safe return. Starving, attempting to secure the lives of their children, women at the home front often knew that there is no romance to war. But what Sassoon saw was something else. From his perspective in the trenches, the woman at home* created a drama of ecstasy and longing and loss. There was the sending of letters, the wait for the letter, the excitement of victories and medals. And a narrow script for the soldier’s suffering, an unwillingness to know the reality of that suffering. In this system, woman’s aggression was both disowned and lust-linked. A woman could only want that which she could not be. She seemed intoxicated by conflict. In Sassoon’s war poems, women praise men’s battles. They desire exciting lies, and they embrace those lies from the war zone. All of this seemed to repose in a collective form of gender dysphoria, in which excitement always came to grief. At a time when gender categories were rigidly enacted through war, this woman’s “grief itself (could) be recruited as a defense against mourning and loss” (Bassin, 1998, p. 18). And so, a soldier could not speak to the woman who loves him (see the poem “A Subaltern” in Sassoon, 1983). Instead, Sassoon kept finding himself, witnessing a broken, dying boy.† One can envision Sassoon, cradling a boy who has never been known by the woman who loves him. In Sassoon’s poetry, these scenes are intimate, brutal, and tender.‡ They seem to be the real locus of love. Here, there are new possibilities of desire. These possibilities are intensified by combat. Once again, these potentials reside in collective forms of gender dysphoria. They can only be expressed in death. Sassoon’s military was not very different from our own, here, in the *

† ‡

Throughout this chapter the “woman at home” is generally female. However, in any war which separates combat soldiers from the domestic universe, there will inevitably be someone (or an entire populace) waiting at home, who addresses the soldier through their civilian desire. One can speculate that if the soldier is female, the “woman at home” could be parents, a male or female partner, etc. But an important feature of this relation is the eroticized idealization which meets the combat soldier. See “Prelude: The Troops,” (1917/1983, p. 104); “Lamentations,” (1917/1983, p. 8). See “Banishment,” p. 108.



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United States. It exalted the homosexual love it prohibited. Combat drew men closer to prohibited intimacy. But just before the soldier becomes homosexual, or turns into a girl, he is gone. Another boy died in a man’s arms, and another “boy at home” aspired to take his place. Because he was only permitted to be what he could not have. Meanwhile, the soldier’s body returns home. And the woman at home has a public romance with mourning.* She is the recipient of the soldier’s medals, she attends his flag draped coffin, and she is recognized as the exclusive object of that soldier’s love.† For Sassoon, this fraudulent romance also appears in the “warmonger at home”: in the quasi-erotic exultations about remote victories.‡ Here, too, desire seems perverse. In 1917, this warmonger would appear to be a man, too old to join up. He, too, seems to romanticize what he cannot be. But this civilian desire seems both autoerotic and homoerotic: The warmonger seems to idealize what he might have been, or perhaps what he thinks he was, with his own band of brothers. Combat is a titillating form of identification; it provides an escape from the banality of life. The warmonger traces combat on maps while Sassoon tracks it in another dismemberment: I’m back from hell … You shall hear things like this, Till the tormented slain Crawl round and once gain, With limbs that twist awry Moan out their brutish pain … For you our battles shine With triumph half-divine; And the glory of the dead Kindles in each proud eye. But a curse is on my head … For I have watched them die. “To the Warmongers” (1983, p. 77)

Once again, Sassoon exposes the ugly reality of combat. He cracks the mirror of civilian desire. Whether soldiers are men or women, they are cannon fodder on the battlefields and fodder for illusion when their battles make the news back home. Sassoon, the decorated war hero, wants us to * † ‡

See “The Hero” (1916/1983, p. 49). See “Their Frailty” (1917/1983, p. 101). See “They” (1916/1983, p. 57).

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know exactly what these Heroics are made of. He exposes the fantasies imposed on soldiers by civilians, and he exposes the terror and degradation which results from those fantasies. His poetry is an anti-war protest, a lamentation, and a devotional. Sassoon reconceived the heroic: He kept faith with the I–Thou relationship. The Soldier’s Return: Narratives of Negation Soldiers know that their battles are fodder for illusion on the home front. They know that they, themselves, are fodder for illusion when they return home. Civilians solicit their lies, and eroticize these lies, and never wonder what these lies are doing to the veteran (see Chapter 3, on Peter). Upon their return, veterans struggle with this problem: Will they accede to our Heroic mythology, or will they refuse it? As the civilian presses for a portrait of nobility and triumph, the “winter soldier” answers with a voice of negation. This voice takes various forms, but it is frequently characterized by the recurrence of no and not. In war stories, no and not differentiate what LeShan (1992) refers to as the “mythic” and the “sensory” realities of war. But they are also hopeful terms: They plead for new forms of intersubjectivity. In their address to civilians, they indicate the veteran’s hope for an authentic dialogue with civilians. To illustrate the veteran’s predicament and his attempt at negation, I turn to an author of fiction, from WWI. This is Hemingway, the “manly” scribe, who participated in two wars: WWI and the Spanish Civil War. He was not a combat veteran; he was an ambulance driver for the wounded, during WWI. In his life, he chased every form of masculine contest (see Baker, 1952). His fiction is preoccupied with the soldier who returns home.* One might expect Hemingway’s fiction to provide a Heroic performance for civilian desire. But his work illuminates the eroticized lies which greet the returning soldier. Throughout much of Hemingway’s work, these lies are met with negation. Indeed, Hemingway is the master of this narrative. His stories echo the erotic arrangements described by Sassoon. They trace the loneliness of the veteran and the impossibility of being known. But sometimes Hemingway’s narrative of negation points to another possibility: the moment when the mirror cracks. *

See A Farewell To Arms (1929); The Sun Also Rises (1926); In Our Time (1925).



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Negation, Despair, and the Permanence of Silence “Soldier’s Home” is one of several war stories which appear in Hemingway’s (1925) In Our Time. In this story, Krebs is a combat veteran. His inner voice perceives the Heroic “obligations” which civilians impose on their veterans. Inside Krebs, these obligations are met with refusal, deadness, and a sense of despair. While Krebs cannot speak, Hemingway is speaking to a civilian audience, about the realities of return. The author points to the need for mutual knowing. Krebs has returned to his parents’ home. He is expected to rest up a bit, find a job, make a success of himself, and get a girl. But he had acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and they talked for a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. … His mother … often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war, but her attention always wandered. His father was non-committal. (p. 70)

In this description, the author surprises us. The “easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers” is not what we expect. It is not the performance of lies and machismo, it is a shared memory of fear and unreality: While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus Christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please Christ … The shelling moved further up the line. (p. 68, italics in original)

This memory is in contrast with the false pose taken in a subsequent encounter with a civilian: The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody. (p. 68, italics in original)

Here, isolation and dissimulation during the war anticipates the isolation and dissimulation which occurs for him after the war. For Krebs, it is evident that civilians expect him to lie. He has returned home, after seeing too much death. Now there is the death of mutual recognition and the death of Eros. He is a local hero; he is expected to court the local girls. To court them, he would have to pose as their Hero. But this heterosexuality is bankrupt:

36

The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude When he was in town their appeal to him was not very strong. He did not like them when he saw them in the Greek’s ice cream parlor. He did not want them themselves really. They were too complicated. There was something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. … He did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn’t worth it. He didn’t want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences. Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him that. (p. 71)

Here, every wanting comes undone. He cannot want the men who know him, and he cannot want the women who refuse to know him. Every sentence spins back on its own negation. So that each narrative layer contradicts the romance of the soldier’s return. And each narrative layer resists Heroic performance, even as it surrenders to despair. Negation, Agency, and the I–Thou Relation In one of Hemingway’s most famous narratives of negation, this refusal yields the possibility of mutual knowing. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), Jake is our veteran–protagonist. He has taken Brett and some male friends to see the bullfight in Spain. Jake and Brett are in love with one another, but that love is frustrated. Jake has heterosexual desire for Brett, but he cannot perform that desire: He has been unmanned by the war. Jake does not hide his condition, and he doesn’t hide from his condition. He lives with his grief. But civilians must have intercourse with Heroic performance. Brett is seeking a youthful, intact, phallic body. She is excited by the bullfighter’s youth, his beauty, and his ritual of violence. The bullfighter has fallen for the older, sophisticated, beautiful Brett. Together, they enact war’s idealized constellation of desire, through the metaphor of the bullfight. For a moment, civilian desire seems to be in a perfect union with Heroic performance: Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett. Everything of which he could control the locality he did in front of her all that afternoon. Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon. (p. 194)

But then the narrative continues, and everything is observed through the lens of the war wound. The next time we see the matador in the ring,



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his fluidity and grace have been compromised. He has been battered by one of Brett’s jealous lovers: a pugilist whom Brett has slept with and then rejected. Throughout this story, Brett is predatory and promiscuous. She cannot become the agent of her own aggression; she can only seduce men to enact her cruelty. She incites male conquest and rivalry; she is excited by their jealous violence, and then she exhorts her men to be “civilized.” Brett represents the woman at home who only seems to want warrior– lovers: men who fight bulls and who fight with each other. Her men are happy to perform. They inflict wounds on each other. In this novel, combat is infused with “masculine” muscle and “feminine” indirection, with motifs of surrogacy and substitution and with switchbacks of agency and aggression. It becomes hard to know whose fists belong to whom. Combat is social complicity. Once again, Hemingway’s portrait of war’s erotic arrangements has much in common with Sassoon’s. The men provide a violent conduit for Brett’s aggression, and Brett’s body is an erotic conduit between the heterosexual men. Jake seems to provide Brett with surrogate lovers; he directs her gaze toward the matador. He seems to think that civilian desire can be fulfilled by Heroic performance. But he also weeps at night and studies this perversity by day. He grows tired of this arrangement, and he leaves. Brett wires him to rescue her in Madrid, where she has parted from the matador. She admits to Jake that she would destroy this “beautiful boy” if she stayed with him. She is going back to a cast-off lover, who is more jaded, like herself. In the taxi to the train for Paris, Jake settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. … “Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” … “Yes,” I said, “isn’t it pretty to think so?” (p. 222)

“Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”—This is one of literature’s most articulate and paradoxical moments of negation. Yes: This is what we have imagined. Isn’t it pretty to think so?: Jake’s comment is simply a matter of truth, of perception. It is uttered by a veteran who fought the last war; it is addressed to a woman who has been inciting the “next war.” It is spoken by a veteran who is tired of combat, to a civilian who recognizes herself as an agent of destruction. In this moment, the mirror ritual turns to glass. Jake and Brett see into themselves and into each other. In Spain, for Brett and her “chaps,” erotic heat was a “deification of cruelty” (Nietzsche, 1886/1966, p. 66). But in transit from Spain to Paris, Jake is coming home, again, from

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the war. This time, Hemingway seems to be telling us this: In combat, there is no perfect union with civilian desire. Exposure and Negation: Expanding Circles of Mutuality Sassoon and Hemingway have described the despair of the soldier’s loneliness, but they are also instructing civilians in a new form of intersubjectivity. This is the moment when the civilian relinquishes the Heroic constellation of desire and listens to the veteran’s testimony. In this engagement, civilians and soldiers reconceive the heroic. They retrieve their own bodies and write their own dialogue. They expand one another’s vista of war. They observe the erotic enticements which allow them to sacrifice children. They witness each other’s war trouble, they know one another, they share the soldier’s tragic guilt, and they disrupt the war chronicle. This can occur in any dialogue between civilians and soldiers. Between lovers. Between soldiers and their children. Between soldiers and their parents. Between soldiers and the “warmonger.” With a psychoanalyst. This dialogue can be initiated from the combat zone or when the veteran has returned home. It appears in war histories, combat narratives, war photography, media reportage, and the film and fiction authored by combat.* Each time another soldier exposes and negates our Heroic mythology, each time another civilian receives that address, and each time a civilian asks, we are interrupting the war machine. We expand the possibilities of I–Thou relatedness, so that soldiers can find mutual recognition, outside the war zone. Combat Speaks and Civilians Listen We hear this expansion of I–Thou relatedness in this letter from Iraq. A soldier tells the truth to his mother. The words no and not repeat themselves as a soldier is returned home: It’s the body bag in the back that makes the flight hard. No jovial banter among the crew. No jokes of home. No wisecracks about the origin of the meat served at the chow hall, just the noise of the flight—the scream of the engines, the whir of the blades clawing at the air, the voice crackling over the radio and echo of your own thoughts about the boy in the bag in the back. … I opened *

See for example, Bassin’s documentary Leave No Soldier (2008).



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[a] magazine and flipped to the story and saw a second picture of a wounded amputee. This one was of a young Navy guy lying in a hospital bed. His wife was sitting beside him. She was not smiling. (Kelly, 2006, p. 275)

Here, negation and exposure are addressed to a mother. But they are also embedded in the relation between a wife and her maimed husband. The wife is not smiling. In this letter, erotic simulations are absent. This is a new form of address, which breaks free of Kreb’s predicament (see earlier discussion of Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”). There are no lies. There is no Heroic performance. A soldier speaks. In the photograph he describes, the woman at home arrives in the war zone. She sees the war wound, and she is without desire. Meanwhile, Captain Kelly seems to have confidence that his mother is listening. The excitement of Heroics, the soldier’s return, the refusal to lie, the expansion of I–Thou relatedness, and the widening vista of war: This discourse can also evolve between a veteran and the boy who wants to be what his father is. Exposure and negation function in this way in See’s (2004) essay on Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). The essay begins with a brief autobiographical sketch about the author’s rural American childhood during WWII. For the author, memory awakens with Pearl Harbor; with the “fiery” transformation of his father. A “sober and deliberate man” is suddenly “elevated” by passion (p. 109). When the author was 4 years old, his “father was commissioned and went to Europe on his grand adventure, leaving me with a handsome soldier suit” (p. 110). That absence is filled with exhilarating enhancements of a boy’s Heroic desire: Great battles were reported in the papers and newsreels. The comics were saturated with grotesque Nazi and Japanese villains and clean-cut American superheroes. … War was pleasure. … There was the war of comic books and movies, the blatant athletic triumph of popular culture; wonderful images, colorful, the degenerate caricatures making all their degradation clear on the one hand, the allied idols clarifying all our virtues on the other … There was never a way not to know what happens next. (p. 110)

And then, at last the war is over. The allies are victorious, and we find ourselves, once again, in the moment of the soldier’s return: father returned, promoted, decorated, laden with more exciting souvenirs. … I was frantic to hear stories of combat bravery, guns and victory, knife fights in the dark, from this great hero who had returned home to such elation and acclaim—the celebration all seemed his to my young eyes. But instead he sat me down and told me about Auschwitz. (pp. 110–111)

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In this moment, there is an undoing which resonates with The Sun Also Rises and with Sassoon’s poetry. But where that undoing insisted on the real horrors of soldiering, now we must also see the real horror of the “just cause.” The vista of war expands because civilian desire has been performed, answered, and emptied. A son greets his father with an idealization of war. See never tells us exactly what his father told him about Auschwitz. But we know that his idealization was interrupted. Where a boy’s imagination was once overflowing with magic, now, in atrocity, imagination has become speechless. As a young boy, See suddenly breaks through “one narrative surface into another place, a darker one than I could have known, though others my age and younger certainly did” (p. 111). For See, WWII forever retained its “popular piety.” But by the age of 7 or 8, it was no longer a cartoon in which “death was left out” (p. 111). In this moment, a child sees the tragic dimension of the “just cause” and becomes a witness to human suffering. In all of these conversations, a veteran keeps answering us, as Jake answered Brett, Isn’t it pretty to think so? Heroic fantasies are disrupted, and there is an awakening of civilian perception. Each time this conversation occurs, it becomes evident that there is no “chivalrous passage of arms” (as Freud, 1915/1963, p. 278, ironically put it). As Fussell’s (1989) memoir of WWII suggests, even the “just cause” is also a cause for disillusionment. Or as Ernest Jones (1915) put it during WWI, Civilized warfare is a contradiction in terms, for under no circumstances is it a civilized act to blow another person’s head off or to jab a bayonet into him, nor can we, after recent events, be any longer subject to the illusion that it is possible to exclude savagery from the warfare of civilized nations … one army may rape where the other loots. (p. 70)

And no one knows this better than a “good soldier.” Combat is a condition of terror, survival, pride, solidarity, and bewilderment. Soldiers engage in acts of love and sacrifice; they fight for the right and they fight for nothing and worse; they fight in madness and chaos and incompetence and despair; they piss and shit themselves, and vomit, and cry out for their mothers. They are formidable and resourceful. They are honorable men and women, and they are disintegrating children. They exult in victories, in the death of the enemy, in their reprieve from death. They commit atrocities, rescue the innocent, die for one another, refuse to shoot, and are struck dumb by the intimate death of an enemy other. They have a lonely reentry into civilization. Then they confront another ethical challenge. Should they lie to civilians? Sometimes they redirect our gaze:



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away from territory, and maps, and battles and triumphs; away from geopolitics, and generals, and heads of state. They lift the veil from our vision and tell us the story we don’t want to be told. In this moment, they refuse to perform as our War Heroes, and they become heroes of war. Peter: Performing Civilian Desire Praise be to the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle. (Psalm 144)

But many of our veterans are like Peter. They are constrained by a code of stoicism and silence. They don’t impose the war wound on our imagination. Instead, their war story conforms to our excitement. Unlike the figures who appear in this chapter, Peter could not subtract himself from civilian desire. He could only perform it, confounding that desire with his own. And he could never see the harm which was done: to himself and to the other. It was impossible to test, for himself, and in relation to his culture, whether the end really justified the means. Instead of a widening vista of inquiry, he embraced Heroic mythology. He was a puer eternus whose war “chronicle” (see Meares, 1998) refracted that which he has already been told. In pursuit of peace and in recognition of our real war heroes, civilians need to break the mirror ritual for the veteran, when a veteran, like Peter, cannot do it himself. If the veteran cannot refuse us, then perhaps we must refuse ourselves for him. Not by demonizing his acts or by leaving him more alone. But by arresting the performance of war’s mirror ritual. By ceasing our solicitation of that performance. By admitting to our disavowed lust and aggression. If Peter cannot tell us his story, we need to tell his story with him. As civilian–analysts, we must construct a new dialogue with the soldier. And so, I embarked on Peter’s analysis. At the end of this analysis, we both emerged, destructive and scarred. But together, we created a eulogy for the “unanchored dead”: Let me pass the gates of Death … I wander about the wide gates and the hall of Death. Give me your hand, I sorrow (Homer, trans. 1990, 23:88)

3 Combat Speaks II Grief and Tragic Memory*

In war, you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true. (O’Brian, 1990, p. 88)

Peter has an unquestioned identity as a War Hero.† Now in his 60s, he stands naked before his mirror. He gazes at his battle scars. Wrinkles, gray hair, withered muscles disappear. Each morning, in the mirror, a golden warrior awakens to look upon himself. And then, a good officer moves out among men. A year after arriving in Vietnam, he ordered the firebombing of a village. His orders set mothers and children and infants on fire. While he watched. While he, himself, shot the elderly and the unarmed. There is some sadness about the burning of children. But his soldiering is always told with a quiet, prideful gravitas. To a civilian who knows nothing. Who was protesting that war when he was fighting it. Conditions were chaos. The enemy was everywhere. There was nothing for it but a scorched earth. A few months after the firebombing, he risked his life to save the lives of his men. Until he was blown up. He was hospitalized for months and received both medals and scars. He lost his right foot and part of his right leg. Since his return from Vietnam, he has been a guiltless man of modest desires. He pursued what he wanted, and what he wanted he got: business success, home, wife, children, grandchildren. Now he wants a pleasant retirement. But this wish is disrupted by the coldness of his wife. Throughout most of his marriage, his wife wanted him. Peter adores his wife, he wants to be adored, and he is made anxious by her coldness. What he wants is to make her desire him again. * †

An earlier version of this chapter was previously published as Grand, S. (2007). Maternal surveillance: Disrupting the rhetoric of war. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 12, 305-322. To recall Peter to the reader’s mind, the first paragraphs of this chapter reprise the beginning of Chapter 2.

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In Peter, there is no conflict over history, no registry of regret. He has no evolving perception of the self or of the other. As he exalts the Heroic myth of combat, as he erases the bestiality of that combat, he can only glimpse the I–Thou relation (Buber, 1923/1970) in an increasing state of rupture. Each morning, the mirror resuscitates a youthful Adonis, an officer who did not die, who will never die, and the gap widens between himself and his real, aging wife. Peter’s life story has no elasticity, no new perspective; it admits no grief or ethical or political complication. It does not respond to time or distance, to changing gender roles, or new historical–cultural epochs; nor to aging, fatherhood, or any other kind of intimate experience. His body, like his vision, is perfected. Soldiering is a hypermasculine phantasm linked to hyperbolic splits. To “gooks” and men, and the purifying necessity of violence. He has never looked at his own grandchildren and seen those other children, burning, in Vietnam. He has never seen the young boy within himself. He has never reflected on his own history. There are no depths to his mirror. For Peter, looking is a condition of blindness. When I asked about his limp, he was crisp and succinct. He told me about the firebombing, and he told me about his last battle. In response to all of my inquiries, Peter is compliant, disinterested, unruffled. His aging, the atrocity, his limp, his war: These were unrelated to his problem. He wanted to talk about his wife. She blames him for his sons’ problems. She thinks he is too “hard”; he thinks she is too “soft.” His two sons are in their 30s. They are divorced, with children. Unsuccessful in marriage, adrift in their careers, financially unstable, they keep returning home. She gives them money, takes them in. Peter thinks she is too indulgent; she makes them passive; they’ve got to “stand on their own two feet.” I thought that this metaphor spoke volumes. He wasn’t interested in it. What he knew was that his wife wouldn’t have sex with him. He didn’t know why. Or what he should do. He attributes her erratic behavior to menopause. About his family, he seemed innocent, but cooperative and earnest. Concerned about his wife and sons, but blank about the conditions for their mistrust. For Peter, there was no reflectivity or interiority (see Slochower, 2006) or interpersonal comprehension. Ogden’s (1986) “autobiographical subjectivity” did not exist. Time and memory skipped atrocity; they skipped decades; they rearranged themselves in the mirror. He lived on a dual track in a continuous present: He was a young, able-bodied good officer; he was a mature solid citizen. The same man, in two different eras: muscular, selfdisciplined, every limb still intact.



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He had no thoughts about his childhood and could tell me little about it. He had a good life, a good marriage, a good family, until now. His wife said that he should go to therapy. He wasn’t sure what she meant, but he would try, if it would fix his marriage. He would come into his sessions, sit forward, and say, “So, okay, let’s get going.” I was quiet, and then he would say it was my “show”; he didn’t know how this worked, but he wanted to “take care of this business.” “Go ahead,” he would say, “shoot.” Shoot? An unnerving invitation from this veteran. I would hesitate, and he would get restless: “I hear you really know your business. I’m paying a lot for this. So go ahead. Shoot.” Not rude, really, but commanding, ready. This was not what I anticipate in an analytic conversation. Do your job. Fire your weapon. Earn your money, Doctor. As an opening gambit, it said everything, and yet, he would have claimed it meant nothing. If I waited, nothing more was forthcoming. And so, I would wonder aloud if he was lonely now that he was estranged from his wife. Lonely? To me, this was a fundamental human question, a universal language for his complaint. To him, this question was incomprehensible. The gulf between us seemed vast. He would try to answer me, but he never knew what I was asking. I tried to listen, but I didn’t know what I was listening for. Often, there seemed to be nothing to hear. I was silent about the firebombing, although it haunted my imagination. Every time he said “shoot,” I saw the elderly and the unarmed. The more I saw them, the more they fell outside my excavations. I am an anti-war activist. But I didn’t think I should impose my own political–ethical perspective on his marital agenda. I didn’t know how to sit with what he had done. I didn’t know how to help him or even what help might mean. Or what ethical compromise it would take for me to assist him. From the first, I held myself apart from, and above, him. I knew nothing about his war. I didn’t want to know anything about his war. But I was certain that I could never do what he had done. There was no shared humanity between us. There was not even a common body. Just as Peter needed an exit from maternal accusation, I needed an exit from any shared destructive capacity. For both of us, that escape had to be embodied. Hormonal. To Peter, his wife was just being menopausal. I saw the firebombing as testosterone gone wild. Estrogen was the bedrock of my nonviolence. I have never believed that biology is destiny or that sex equals gender. But our estrangement felt cellular, structural, sexed, biochemical. Sometimes I felt that we were not even of the same species. He sat quietly in his chair. But when I looked at him, I saw an animal poised for preda-

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tion. His body would mutate; he was not even a “him” but a beast, “red in tooth and claw.” I didn’t think I could tolerate seeing him even once a week. I could not identify Peter as a human subject. Or want him as a human object. Oddly enough, he wanted to come twice. He didn’t know about this psychology business, but he wanted to solve his problem, and quick. I knew I could not proceed with him in such a state of repugnance. Somehow, I had to defer the atrocity and contain the atrocity, while I found some empathic pathway to his interiority. I pursued the only intervention which seemed possible: a detailed inquiry into his relations with his wife and children. It was a dull but reasonable conversation. Peter is bewildered: He was a good father and husband, and suddenly, he isn’t. His wife and sons are now united in a cold front against him. When he comes into the room, they seem angry and fall silent. He says, “It’s like I was some kind of beast.” “As if I was some kind of beast.” Ordinarily, of course, I would ask him for his associations. But this is not an ordinary conversation. I don’t pick up the referent to the beast. Instead, I engage in psychoeducation about familial communication, roles, and interactions. He is a serious, if concrete, student. He is not interested in his own psychodynamics or in the patterns learned in his own childhood. He has a very narrow lexicon for his own affects; he has no dreams, no explicit transference material for me to attend to. But he practices new interpersonal strategies. I am resigned to a superficial psychotherapy, and I anticipate a premature termination. His family life will get patched up, and then he’ll move on. I will never have to look at his war, and he will never look into his soul. At this moment, we are alienated from each other, but we are also secured by our mutual isolation. If a mechanical treatment turns into a mechanical termination, we will never be disturbed by each other. Neither of us will ever really know what happened in that war. This is a kind of mutual blindness, which characterized Peter’s marriage, for many years. But for Peter, this blindness was also the occasion for his wife’s desire. The loss of that desire is a mysterious and painful condition. I don’t want him, and I can’t imagine his wife wanting him, and I can’t imagine his sons wanting to be him. I think I am seeing into his war zone. After all, I don’t believe in his Heroic phantasms, and I know about atrocity. But when I glance at Peter, I’m only seeing what I remember from anti-war protests in the 1960s. We resisted the Vietnam War, and we didn’t know the soldier who fought in that war. While Peter’s wife was gazing at her Heroic phantasm, I was gazing at my own Hero: the draft dodger, who fled to Canada, went to prison, joined the Peace Corps, or became a conscientious objector.



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Forty years later, Peter and I are meeting in my office. Civilian and soldier; pacifist and combatant: Our identities and our positions are fixed. Neither of us has ever been informed by the other. A premature termination would have left us intact. But Peter and I went the distance. Our identities unraveled, and we began to grieve for all of the “unanchored dead.” We began to think, “not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, and the philosophy which produced the murderer” (King, 1963/1999). To achieve this, we would have to cast doubt on our war stories and come to know one another. The human mind is a miraculous and courageous instrument. Our treatment seemed inert. But together, we conjured a “war zone.” We re-created Heroic performance and civilian desire. We reproduced Peter’s mirror, and then we allowed that mirror to crack. Refracting Cultural Blindness Eventually, Peter and I would restore tragic vision, and we would share tragic memory. But we began in a condition of mutual blindness. As I suggested in Chapter 2, this predicament was not peculiar to this treatment dyad. When nations prosecute foreign wars, our war rhetoric always conjures this silence and blindness. If civilians could somehow see into live combat, they might be more hesitant about war. To prosecute war, our governments must loosen our empathic and ethical constraints. Toward that end, ideologies regulate what citizens can, and cannot, see. Through selective and absent images of combat, politics occlude, and focus, the public eye. As Sontag (1997) notes, war photography has been used to ignite arousal and to suppress reflectivity. As a result of this manipulation, our gaze is directed away from the pain of others. But our gaze is also directed away from the real pain of ourselves. Peter could not ask about the suffering of his victims. I could not ask about what drove a boy to kill innocent victims. For decades, neither of us had access to divergent, complicating images. We only saw what our polemics had prescribed or imagined. When citizens (soldiers and civilians) have access to divergent images of combat, humane responsiveness tends to appear. Soldiers and civilians start having complicated conversations. To exhort us toward war, this conversation must be foreclosed. Humane responsiveness interferes with mass violence. To diminish empathy and tragic guilt, our ideologies direct our gaze toward what the enemy is doing to us. We are frequently prevented from seeing what we are doing to our own children, and we cannot

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see what our soldiers are doing to their children. To arouse us to war, our communal sensorium must become an insulated field of totalizing knowledge.* To achieve this, war rhetoric “transforms the whole society into a field of perception” (Foucault, 1979, p. 214). As Feldman (2000) suggests, this requires strict visual controls, which act as a closed “circuit of vision and violence [which] is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention” (p. 49). In the reportage of war, we can find this wholesale control of our vision and knowledge. After the American invasion of Iraq, the American media were forbidden to photograph the flag-draped coffins of returning soldiers. Injured troops are similarly kept outside the camera’s view, “‘flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night’ … both Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda barred the press from ‘seeing or photographing incoming patients’” (Benjamin, 2007).† In these selective and absent images, the war wound is replaced by imaginary whole bodies. At the home front, our sensorium seems to inform us, but we are not informed. As Feldman (2000) describes it, this is a condition in which we seem to know “who and what can be watched,” but we cannot seem to know what sees (p. 52). This is a kind of cultural pathology which holds the soldier hostage.‡ It dictates civilian percepts of the soldier-as-war-Hero§ or the soldier-as-war-criminal. Throughout much of our society, civilian desire solicits heroic performance. Soldiers perform for that desire. Entire nations can be emptied of remorse and ambivalence and filled up with noble causes. Magic omnipotent denial (Klein, 1946/1952) sustains us in dangerous states of arousal. We act as a collectivity of unthinking bodies, who cannot think about other bodies, wounded. Or we repudiate our soldiers for “their” war crimes, deny our own culpability, and refuse to reconceive the heroic. The War Zone Breaks Into Psychoanalysis In Peter’s treatment, I discovered that I, too, suffered from war blindness. I also discovered that this blindness can never coincide “with itself * † ‡ §

This creates what Mahler (1968) described as an omnipotent autistic orbit. This policy has been reversed by the Obama administration. This condition has resonance with the psychotic processes described by Williams (1998). For some anti-war activists in the 1960s, there was some tendency to see the soldier as the Evil Other. This has changed substantially in the current anti-war movement, in which soldiers are treated with concern and respect.



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in a moment of perfect, remainder-less, grasp” (Norris, 1987). Eventually, combat arrives at our door. This happens, in a variety of ways, for civilians at the home front. It happened, metaphorically, in Peter’s treatment. We were working on familial communication patterns. The treatment was dull and banal, and it seemed transient. Then suddenly, the frame goes into breakdown. I see Peter at my home office in New Jersey. While things were plodding and dull with him, another case had been heating up. A woman patient is about to separate from her husband. Paranoid, intermittently psychotic, addictive, raging, and dependent, the husband has been in and out of treatment for many years. They have three children. Recently he tried to get a gun permit under a false identity. She has decided to get out. She fears his incipient violence. The police have recommended that she get a restraining order. This man knows where I live; he has left me threatening messages. My local police recommend a security system; they advise me to carry an emergency alert in case I am accosted on the driveway. I lock the door to the waiting room, and a new security camera is installed. A few days after this installation, I am waiting to see Peter. My last patient has left, and I have about 30 minutes before Peter is due to arrive. He is rarely early. I go out to get the newspaper. And there he is, my patient’s husband, pacing on my driveway. He rushes over, loud, cursing, begging. I am trying to be firm, to get him to leave. Peter picks today to come early. He walks right into this altercation, before I even realize he is there. He confronts the other man and barks at him, once, to get out. My patient’s husband hesitates, blusters, while Peter seems bigger, straighter, broader, more fluid, and more powerful than he seems in my office. There again, is the stern voice, telling him to get out and not to come back. The husband shuffles away, muttering. Peter asks if I am okay. I ask him to meet me at the backdoor to the office. I go in the front door, and buzz him in through the new security system. I have a few minutes to collect myself. When Peter comes in, it’s clear he’s got the story. The altercation, the new security system: It’s a crazy patient or a crazy relative of a crazy patient. “You look pale,” he says, “do you want time to yourself? Do you want to call anybody? Can I do anything?” He wants to know what I’m doing to secure my own safety. Have I spoken to the police? When is my husband coming home? He’s protective and pissed as all hell at the jerk on the driveway. I am touched by Peter for the first time. But I’m appalled at the disintegration of the frame. In 5 minutes on my driveway, his protected, private space has been eliminated. I feel unprofessional, out of control. How can I go back to my therapeutic position? Who is the patient here,

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in this moment? I was his doctor, now he’s my bodyguard? I feel like Dr. Melfi, who fantasized about Tony Soprano’s protection. I try to shift the conversation away from me and ask him what he is feeling. As usual, he can’t recognize his affects, especially his own vulnerability, but simply refers to danger and action: “The guy’s a nut. He could’ve taken a swing at you.” A pause. Then: “You might have been all right, but it’s a good thing I was here.” There is no language for his subjectivity. But as I am trying to recoup my therapeutic position, I am aware of a new sensation. I have enjoyed his soldierly protection. I have seen him as he sees himself in his mirror. I am riveted by his assurance in danger. I want to imagine my Heroic future as he remembers his Heroic past: muscular, fearless, incontestable in danger. Once, he had evoked my revulsion. I had been unable to imagine him as an erotic object. Now I want to be him and to have him. As a heterosexual woman of a certain age, I am inhibited in my aggression. After the altercation on the driveway, I despise that inhibition. Suddenly, that hate is mutating my desires. For 35 years, Peter has recycled himself as a War Hero. He has an opportunity for this performance when he sees me accosted. Now the story of killing “gook” children can become the rescue of “our” women and children. So that his body can change in its erotic significance. I can want to be him, and to have him, without knowing that the him I want to be and have is the same him who commissioned an atrocity. For the first time in my memory, I can admire a military uniform. I see a “good soldier” and imagine that soldier unsoiled by war. In the moment when I join Peter in his mirror, he sets me loose from my feminine constraints. Over the next few sessions, he refers back to the incident on the driveway. I know he’s worried about my soft female body. He figures, correctly, that my husband was off at work when the “jerk” accosted me. I am moved by Peter’s concern and his kindness. But I feel imprisoned by this feminine impotence and dependence. Peter, my husband, the police: Why do I need their protection? Why aren’t my muscles good enough? Just then, he says, “You know, you were really pretty tough out there. I was watching from the street for a minute. You were doing okay.” Really? He could not have given me a better gift. I do not subject it to analysis, because it might turn out to be a wish or a fantasy or a projection, an appeal to my narcissism, or a strategy of false reassurance. For himself, and for me. Maybe this is what soldiers tell each other, after they have just shit themselves in combat. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Right now, I need my toughness to be real.



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Together, we make that toughness real. I am becoming hard-bodied, because a hard-bodied old soldier sees and admires my prowess. In the same session, he praised my incisive “muscle” about familial communication. Increasingly, he uses military lingo: After our meetings, he says he implements his “marching orders.” I stopped being an armchair, timid, bookish, know-nothing; I stopped being a vulnerable girl who needed a man to protect her. I was someone who could “cut through” interpersonal disorder. I got the job done. With my own precision weaponry, and a minimum of “collateral damage.” Without arousing any latent shell shock in this decent old veteran. He made me feel like a good officer. And he got to be a grunt in my army. He told me war stories, and I, the pacifist, found myself laughing. My patient’s husband hadn’t been back. But he was still calling and screaming. It was a difficult few weeks of management. Peter was there with me, in the “war zone.” He mixed black humor and concern with phallic solidarity and recognition. I knew he was still taking care of me by getting me laughing; I tried to ask him about it, but he just cracked another joke. In the rest of life, I am anti-war. But in the moment on the driveway, Peter saw into me. I became Peter’s because he knew and confirmed what I desired. I yielded the division between his body and mine. I was enraptured, and I was gone. Gone for a soldier. Because, in his eyes, I found my own force. I found my own aggression, and I felt victorious. And in my gaze, he, too, would become enraptured. Gone for a soldier. Because treatment would make him feel that he could be loved by a man, and love a man, without ever having his sexual identity unravel. All of this was potentiated by the electronic eye at my door. Once, the waiting room had been open to all. Now, each time Peter arrived, an ocular apparatus functioned as a persecutory system: It discriminated between “bad men” and “good men,” and then it let the “good man” come in. Peter’s destructiveness was extruded onto a real, alternate personification: my other patient’s husband. Badness was outside, goodness was inside, and our aggressive bonding was legitimized. Sometimes the absurdity of this security arrangement would strike me: The man I was admitting to my waiting room had killed countless victims. The man I was keeping out was nasty and crazy, but he hadn’t killed anyone. My patient’s husband was a real danger. But he also seemed like the personification of a traumatized veteran: paranoid, addictive, hypervigilant, armed, ill-adjusted to peace. My patient’s husband had never been in combat. But he signified that other Peter, who never came home from his war. Each session, the security sys-

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tem kept that Peter out. So that the one who came in was neither damaged nor damaging: He was sane, and potent, and alive, and intact. Like me, this Peter was a heterosexual “of a certain age.” In going to war, he had a fixed vision of a man. If I was inhibited in aggression, he was inhibited in love: He had to be the man whom he could not want to have. When male armies go into combat, love between men is deep, and physical, and tender. They can touch because they are killing; they can touch because they are dying. But that touch must be asexual, narrowly constituted by violence. About homosexuality, the U.S. military is still stuck with “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” But now, in the analytic dyad, Peter anoints me as a male officer, who is also a heterosexual woman desirous of a man. He has me looped in a loop of erotic complication, so that he can desire a man, and be desired by a man, and imagine that the man is female. All of this emerged in unconscious derivatives. When he talks about wanting sex with his wife, I inquire exactly how he wants to have sex. When I asked this earlier in his treatment, he would say, “What do you mean? Like before.” This meant his arousing her, then the missionary position, him on top, her below. Now, when I ask this question again, he is embarrassed. He’s been having dreams of someone sucking his penis. He’s on his back. Silence. Then, “I’m not gay you know. Jesus. This therapy shit.” I ask him what he is dreaming, and he tells me that sometimes it’s a man, sometimes it’s a woman sucking his penis. “Jesus. I’m not gay am I? How could I be gay?” He is cringing with shame. So I say that I don’t think this is about being straight or gay. I say, “Maybe passivity has something exciting to it.” He’s straining to get this and says, “Oh you mean I’m not gay!” I don’t say anything. Then he says, “Oh, I think I get it. If someone else is on top, it’s gotta be a man?” Yes, I say, you want to lay back and it frightens you at the same time. It’s lonely and tiring the way you are living. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone else got to know you, took care of YOU? But in your mind, they would have to be sort of a man and sort of a woman. Tough enough so you could lay back. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “I do sort of lay back sometimes in here. I get to talk and you listen.” There is a silence, and he gets worried: Do I think he wants me to suck his dick? “Jesus, you Freudians, everything is about sex.” More cringing and then a lightbulb goes off. For the first time, he grasps at a metaphor as if it is a life raft. Not a moment too soon: What a relief! “Oh, you mean maybe I want you to take care of me, sort of.” His emergence from concrete thinking saves him from gender disorganization and sexual humiliation. He is still heterosexual. And he’s not



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soliciting fellatio from his therapist. He just wants some rest. To stop giving the orders, trying to save his unit. But he’s afraid of lying down—some jerk might fuck with him or fuck him up. I say that the desire which would fulfill him is associated with violence. After this, his associations become more fluid. I suggest that his erotic dreams refer, in part, to lying on my couch. After some anxious joking, he decides to lie down. He continues to tell me war stories, and I notice some sadness intermixed with his exhilaration. I inquire about whether he misses his men: the ones who are alive and the ones who are dead. He starts telling more about how and when they were killed. Gradually, grief emerges about all of his lost men: his war buddies, his sons, his father. He is less shy about wanting male love. At home, he behaves better with his wife and sons. Like his leg, the analysis seems intact, even though the frame was blown up. Indeed I feel somewhat magical: I am a warrior and a pacifist; racing ahead of contradiction, so that contradictions are seamless. I have tutored him in vulnerability and compassion, while our unconscious field continued to be captivated by war. At that time, my dreams were idealized transcripts of firepower, in which the firebombing did not exist. By day, I was protesting the war in Iraq. But at night, combat became exaltation without horror. I was a ready conscript to the Heroic imaginary. I was a teenage boy signing up to “be a man”; I was a woman who always wanted to be a man, and I was a romantic girl captivated by uniforms. Peter was a guiltless good officer, and, he was a grunt in my army. In the area of our shared seduction, Peter and I only saw our perfected bodies. Regardless of whether I was being him or having him, regardless of whether he was being me or having me, we were, “systematically sanitized … everyone has his limbs, his hands and feet and digits, not to mention expressions of courage and cheer” (Fussell, 1989, p. 268). For each of us, desire had become more elastic, but it had an affinity with killing, with that “awe, fascination with power, and feelings of violence and boundlessness that transgression arouses” (Stein, 1998, p. 256). In some ways, we were having a very important conversation. But our conversation reconfirmed warfare’s constellation of desire: Heroic performance kept igniting civilian desire. Civilian desire kept soliciting Heroic performance. Looking was a condition of blindness. If we began in a system of distance and alienation, now we had a manic system of immortality and idealization.

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The Return of the Repressed In this position, we had no access to tragic memory. We couldn’t mourn his “unanchored dead.” For some reason, we couldn’t seem to break into this mirror. We couldn’t refuse Heroic performance, and we couldn’t subtract that performance from civilian desire. And so, our unconscious field produced another figuration, who could see into the war zone. This figure had the all-seeing eye of maternal grief. She evoked our shame and dread. But, eventually, she also awakened our tragic guilt. Two months passed since the altercation on the driveway. My patient’s husband was no longer menacing. In his treatment, Peter moved between martial excitement, an unconscious wish for dependence, and a narrow band of grief which recognizes us but not them. For both of us, real external threat was fading. The electronic eye began to shift its meaning. Previously, the “eye” had been confirmatory of our mutual phallic goodness, legitimizing our solidarity in a “just” war. But now the “eye” seemed to grow breasts. And without a real external threat to absorb badness, badness started threatening to “come in.” Peter was preoccupied with the security system, with its one-way field of vision. On the way I could look into, and at him, without his being able to see me seeing him. It was winter by now, and the days were getting shorter: What if dusk obscured his image in the eye and made me mistake Peter for HIM? What if I thought he was the nut and I wouldn’t let him in? What if I called the police? I said, “On the couch, and in the eye of the camera, I can see you without you seeing me see you. You can’t be sure what I am seeing, and I might somehow see YOU as the ‘beast.’” For the first time, I have uttered that word which links us to the atrocity. He cannot formulate any kind of response. And then he reports a series of dreams. He is at home, in his bedroom. The room with the mirror. A woman is just there: gloved, demure, coifed. Eyes obscured by the black mesh veil of a pillbox hat. A 1960s, White, ladylike presence, reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy’s elegance. At first he barely notices that she is in the room. But her presence is both fixating and obscure. She sits, and she is silent. He doesn’t know her. He cannot see her eyes behind the veil. The dream reoccurs, and his dread seems to increase with every repetition. I ask him for his associations. He can only say that she reminds him of Jackie Kennedy, at JFK’s funeral. Although he doesn’t know what this means. The pacifist within me has been dormant, but now it is reawakened by her



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entrance—Jackie, the aristocrat of motherhood whose own children were half orphaned by violence. Whose husband was sanctified by his assassination. Inserted into history as another “profile in courage.” In a condition of eternal youth. Like Peter, in his mirror. In 1960s America, Jackie’s widowhood was grace; her dignity and fortitude were used to confirm the man’s Heroic honor. But now, in Peter’s unconscious, that widowhood is becoming an admonishment. Grieving, she watches Peter. She is saying nothing, doing nothing, but she casts the “evil eye” on his badness. Peter’s dread is shapeless and wordless and insistent. The perpetrator in him seems to become a child, a toddler, an infant. I asked him what Jackie sees. His body became fetal and turned toward the wall. Then he said, she knows what we did. Now he begins to tell me about his war. In this telling, I am implicated: She knows what we did. We began to communalize combat (Shay, 1994): His atrocity was becoming our atrocity, and his war was becoming my war. Maternal Surveillance: When Grief Restores Absent Images When the war zone has been obscured by our Heroic mythology, soldiers often find that they cannot tell the truth to civilians. Civilians cannot ask soldiers for the truth of combat. When we are both sealed into this arrangement, our “mirror” can only be broken by a third perspective. In Peter’s analysis, this third perspective arrived when we had reached another moment of stasis. It appeared as another set of eyes: the eyes of an all-seeing “Mother.” This dream figure was not unique to Peter’s personal unconscious. It can be traced to the structure of war rhetoric, as it resides in our “social unconscious” (Layton, 2006). In the rhetoric of war, we always find an idealized and sacrificial Mother. Her loins have yielded the Hero; she has relinquished him to destiny; she waits; she mourns his remains. Her eyes are always cast upon the war zone. In our warrior mythology, this maternal figure functions as a perfected projective object. She has the all-seeing eye of loss and grief. This figure refers to our fantasies of our primordial, infant Mother. Once, her infant’s body was entirely known to her, when that infant was still in a state of unknowing. Her eyes have always registered that which we could not see. What she sees cannot be disputed. During war, the Hero’s Mother seems to maintain this sacred claim to truth. She has sent her child off to war; she watches; and she sees the death of her Hero son. In this construc-

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tion, the Hero’s mother is nominated as a maternal Hero. Harris (1983) describes this figure: She waits always in the position of mother, to whom return is made, as the mirror reflects the bravery and valor of military men … [She is] the angel of consolation … in whose name war is made and danger is suffered, the one who holds the place for virtue and love, while men do the dirty work of violence and death. (p. 94)

In the polemics of foreign wars, her mourning is meant to witness our soldier’s wound and legitimize our aggression. Her grief and authority confirms the “just war.” But she can only confirm the “just war” if her grief has superhuman powers. Those superhuman powers reside in her maternal surveillance: in her omniscient look at the war zone. In our social unconscious, this maternal surveillance has exceptional force. In war rhetoric, this force confirms the division between us and them. But maternal surveillance can slip outside the constraints of our ideologies. Real mothers are actually weeping in the war zone. One mother’s grief eventually refers to other mothers. All of them have lost their own children. Together, they seem to grieve for all children. Civilians and soldiers. Enemies and allies. The line blurs between us and them. Mourning becomes an exponential expanse, a universal restoration of war’s absent images. If war rhetoric has obscured the war zone and silenced our soldiers, maternal grief seems to restore our tragic vision. And so her grief found us, in the United States, in February 2007. The war in Iraq was entering its fourth year. We had never seen returning coffins or the bodies of the wounded. Political debate raged: Do we send more troops or pull out? One day, the New York Times headline read: “Analysis of Iraq’s Future Is Bleak, but Both Sides in War Debate Find Support” (Mazetti, 2007). The article was replete with data, political analysis, strategies, noble causes. But on the page, the text was visually displaced. The text became a border which worked itself around the edges of a large, black and white photo. The photo displayed a street in Baghdad. There was a car in the background, shattered from a bombing. Debris littered the street. Behind that car, there was another car, mangled. In the recesses of the photo, men huddled, their backs turned to us. In a posture which was suggestive of despair. In the foreground, a woman faced us. Draped in black, head covered by a hijab. Her face was exposed. Her hand was covering her mouth. She seemed to have witnessed the unspeakable. On her hand, there was a simple gold band. Her face was round, she was not young; she gazed out at us in sadness. Next to her was a small child, perhaps 5 years



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old. White sweater, thick black hair, eyes round with fear and supplication. The woman seemed to hold the child’s hand. This child seemed to refer to other children, no longer living. To orphans, whose mothers were not living. Woman and child were unidentified. To someone in Baghdad, they were, of course, particular. To us, in the United States, this mother suggested a nameless series of mothers. Whose eyes have seen all, and know all, and address us with their grief. Below the photo, a caption read, “A common scene in Baghdad: a car bomb in a Shiite commercial district. Violence against Shiites and among them is a theme in a new prognosis” (Mazetti, 2007, p. A6). The text traced reasoned political discourse. It traced violence between Sunnis and Shiites. No photos attested to the detritus of American bombings. Our government had allowed us to see the effect of only insurgent bombings. But maternal surveillance pointed us toward every war wound. Looking out at us from the combat zone, she reinstated those absent images which had been withheld from our eyes. Her grief reminded us that there is no “chivalrous passage of arms” (Freud, 1915/1963, p. 277). In war, the “all-seeing maternal eye” becomes a potent antidote for our cultural blindness. When the chronicle of violence prevails, this gaze is conjured in art forms, in media; it is activated in women’s protest movements. It is conjured, as well, in the psychoanalysis of a war Hero like Peter. He never converted his war wound into a narrative. His war vista is still controlled by Heroic mythology. When a soldier commissions atrocity without any guilt or remorse, when Heroic mythology never converses with loss and grief, this is when the maternal phantasm arrives. This personification seems to know that, as Sartre (1943/1964) put it, “through shame we confer on the Other an indubitable presence” (p. 251). Conjuring Maternal Admonishment When Peter starting dreaming about Jackie, our phallic idealization fell apart. In Peter’s material, I started to move between being the omniscient mother and being exposed to the omniscient mother. Sometimes he imagined that I have her x-ray vision. He made more confessions. Sometimes Jackie seemed like a transferential referent to my feminine nonviolence. I certainly wanted to claim her as myself. But it became clear that her ethical authority was not my own. The woman in the veil appears and reappears in a multiplicity of forms, ceasing to be Jackie, proliferating, morphing into almost any anonymous woman in a veil. Muslim. Catholic.

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Jewish. Pious, demure, sexless. Draped, anonymous, nameless, concealed. What she derives from me is my body configuration, my position of seeing without being seen. But as she moves further from Jackie, from my own sociocultural context, it is clear that this phantasm borrows from me but that she is also not me. She is something outside of, and beyond, this treatment. She is the return of the repressed, a signifier for an unknown series of mothers and children, a personification of persecutory guilt, a precursor of Benjamin’s (2006) “moral third.” This figure borrows my eyes. But she also sees in me what she sees in Peter: righteousness inflated to evacuate terror. Intoxicated aggression. Us versus them. When Peter is not imagining that I have the omniscient eye, he is dreaming of me as another soldier. The phrase repeats, “She knows what we did.” Our crimes seem broadcast from one veiled woman to another. This is a transference representation which reflects perception, not projection. All through this treatment, I have been sacrificing her children. Insofar as I remembered the atrocity, I excluded Peter from the realm of the human. I never wanted to know the subjective reality of his war. Insofar as I was enticed by Peter’s Heroics, I forgot that innocents were burning. I forgot about traumatized boy soldiers. I was excited by combat. Once, I thought Peter was narcissistic, or schizoid, or suffering from a well-concealed version of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTD). Now I knew him as a warrior–sacrifice, offered up at the altar of our civilian desires. If I had been in his war, perhaps I would have shot the elderly and the unarmed. Peter and I were human, we were whole, and then we had become someone’s enemy. Demonized. Threatened. Me, on my driveway. Peter, in boot camp, and then, in Vietnam. There, we lost the compass of depressive intersubjectivity. Like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, we found ourselves traveling “in the night of the first ages, without a sign and no memories … in need of some deliberate belief” (Bhabha, 1985, p. 146). We needed a belief that had the mythic properties of the Heroic. As we sought these mythic properties, human frailty was replaced by violence. There was no war wound. There was no resonance with vulnerability, in the self, in the other. Our manic defenses (see Altman, 2005; Peltz, 2005) locked us into a persecutory system. Together, we were blind to the ordinary body, until a veiled woman returned that body to our vision. Particular and nameless, she was both real and a phantasm. She invoked both the intersubjective and the fantastic registers (see Benjamin, 1995). She was the trace of shared cultural and historical referents. And she was the trace of primordial body memory. She was a mysterious subject,



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who acted upon us like the return of the repressed. Her veil denoted a gaze which had seen all but which could not be seen. As no one, she was a universal signifier for the abject. But she was also the “mythical” or “transformational” object (Bollas, 1986; see also Mitrani, 2001) whom we nominated as sacred. A beacon of light, a figure of dark enchantment, an “Angel” and an “omniscient Mother” (Benjamin, 1995): We imbued with her “symbiotic or telepathic knowing” (Bollas, 1986, p. 95). Her gaze was the font of life, from which we could be cast out. In this figuration, an absent “I” enhanced the power of the omniscient maternal “eye.” Her veil seemed to lift the veil from our eyes. Our shared response to this trope was an “adoration [which] covers dread with awe and mystery” (Horney, quoted in Benjamin, 1995, p. 81). To be recognized, to come into view, our violent “not me” selves (Sullivan, 1953) required this dark version of the transformational object. She was an object whose vision would not be deferred to the visual controls of our culture. This omniscient Mother seemed immune to those “language rules and denials” (Arendt, 1958) which prevail in “atrocity-producing” (Lifton, 2005) situations. Placing “the presentation of fragile human life above the instrumentalities of technocratic power,” her vista of war was “a rejection of amoral statecraft and an affirmation of the dignity of the human person” (Ruddick, 1989, p. 81). She restored wounded children to our vision. Protest Theatre: When War Meets Maternal Surveillance For Peter, this was an intimate, relational transformation. But this transformation also occurs on the political stage, when women protest. War and state terror are wanton in their erasure of mothers and children. But resistance movements can turn grief into a force of maternal omniscience. In protest theatre, woman bodies become both reality and phantasm; they link the intersubjective and the fantastic registers. Inserted into our vision, in the public domain, they crack the mirror of our Heroic mythology. During these acts of resistance, the visual field is appropriated by a mother who “propels a regenerative cycle” through “mourning play” (Bassin, 1998). Women achieve this by “de-privatizing their mourning” (see Elshtain, 1994, p. 81) in public spectacles which conjure the woman in the veil. To transgress before the Mother’s immaculate authority; to have this moment engraved on the public transcript (Scott, 1992); to have that transcript dispute the authority of our governmental directives: Here, destruction can meet the threshold of its own impossibility.

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It was in this way that Cindy Sheehan kept vigil at U.S. President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch, during the war in Iraq. For weeks, we watched her watching him, in a nonviolent, public spectacle. He could not speak, or move against her, or even have her removed. Because her son, Casey, was killed in the war in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan was no one: She was a nameless mother and a nameless soldier’s mother,* and then, in her vigil, she became every soldier’s Mother. As Ruggiero (2006) puts it, Peace advocate, movement leader, passionate—Sheehan is all of these things. But after spending last Monday with her, I realize that above and beyond all else, Cindy is a Mother. Not just a Mother, but Mom Laureate, Subcomandante Momus, Nobel Peace Mom, Dr. Mom, Jr., Mahatma Momdi, National Mom, World Mom, Milky Way Mom. Which is to say, Casey’s Mom. (p. ix)

In Ruggiero’s description, Sheehan’s protest becomes both real and a phantasm. It linked the intersubjective and the fantastic registers (Benjamin, 1995). She was an ordinary, particular, grieving mother, speaking on behalf of other, ordinary mothers. She named her son, and she named herself. But she also draped herself in the veil of maternal deindividuation. As a particular mother, and as every Mother, she gained mythic force. She had birthed the Hero; she held sacred status in the war chronicle. And then she reconceived the heroic and refused to confirm the “just war.” As a particular and private mother, her loss had previously been enlisted by the president in a ritual intended to confirm Bush’s compassion (Sheehan, 2006). But in her vigil as Mother, her authority exposed his lack of all compassion. Watching Bush, Sheehan restored our absent images of the war. While our president’s agency was confounded. Belligerent, wanton, freely trafficking in violence, he found himself paralyzed. His advisors couldn’t find anything to do to her or with her. Because the “omniscient maternal eye” had found them. If they made a public gesture against her, they risked that “dread that through her he might die or be undone” (Horney, 1932/1967, p. 81). Cindy Sheehan was untouchable. She dignified doubt. She invited the testimony of soldiers (see Zinn, in Sheehan, 2006). She created a bridge between civilians and soldiers. War resistance took off, and other soldiers’ mothers expanded Sheehan’s activities.† * †

Sheehan states that her war resistance was mobilized, in part, by Bush’s ignorance of her son’s name when he proffered his condolence for her loss, see Ensler (2006). After Sheehan’s protest, maternal anti-war activism increased in my hometown, Teaneck, NJ.



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Sheehan’s action drew on what Steiner (1984) refers to as our “antique imaginings” of a primordial Mother. This Mother knew her infant’s body, when her infant was in a state of unknowing. She once contained the fetus within her own uterus. Her umbilicus refers to our helpless dependence. Her look reduces us to children. It scolds us; it evokes shame and the dread of punishment. To mobilize these “antique imaginings,” women must conjure themselves as the umbilical body. They achieve this effect by donning markers of deindividuation. They achieve it by mobilizing their lack of subjectivity. Then they inscribe this lack with the named particularity of the wounded, the dead, and the disappeared. Maternal surveillance is a frequent trope in war resistance and in resistance to state terror (see Elshtain, 1994; Graziano, 1992; Hollander, 1997; Maathai, 2006). The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (see Hollander, 1997), the pro-democracy movement in Kenya (see Maathai, 2006), the Liberian Mass Action for Peace (see Herbert, 2009): These were nonviolent resistance movements, mobilized by women, in opposition to state terror. These movements had a formidable effect, because they marshaled the force of Maternal grief, admonishment, and surveillance. During the Dirty War in Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo kept vigil: Walking in a silent circle around a monument in the heart of the Plaza, (there) were hundreds of women wearing white scarves, … their faces a bold contrast to the whiteness of their covered heads. I noticed embroidered name and dates on the backs of the scarves and visible around the necks of these women were photographs of young men and women, some couples, some children. Beneath the photos were printed names and dates… . they wore necklaces of despair and grief as others might wear pearls or brooches. (Hollander, 1997, p. 77)

And far away, in another culture, women protested the detention and torture of men in Kenya’s Green Belt movement. These women were unarmed; they were assaulted by armed soldiers, and they faced the same threat of detention and torture. Their defenseless bodies suddenly mutated into primordial bodies, as mothers used the force of their own deindividuation: And it was in the course of that beating . … that the women did what African women would normally do. If they’re beaten by men old enough to be their sons, they expose their breasts, they expose their nakedness, they shake their breasts, and that is to say, “I curse you, my son, because you have dared to beat your mother” … and that definitely was the beginning of the end of the Moian regime. Indeed, the regime was cursed by the women, and within the next 10 years, it was completely out of power. (Maathai, 2006, p. 187)

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In my view, the potency of these movements is derived from the very structure of violence, with its gendered “social unconscious” (see Layton, 2006). Because war (and state terror) are characterized by splitting, they tend to “masculinize” the aggressive subject, while diminishing a weak, feminine object. But they also anoint a mysterious, unknown, and beatific, primordial Mother. Who stays home and awaits the returning Hero. Who stays home, to birth the next Hero. This figure is obscured and domesticated, lest it emerge to dominate the infantile self states which are expressing their dominance through violence (see Benjamin, 1988). As a primitive narcissistic object, this primal figure can confer a halo on the aggressor. But she is also the judge, the original arbiter of good and evil, who sees into our destructiveness. Peter: Dread, Maternal Surveillance, and Remorse But this Mother is not just a signifier for exposure, dread, and retribution. She is always a signifier for loss and grief. She refers to a multiplicity of bodies in the war zone. Her children are the victims of the phallic warrior. Her child is the phallic warrior himself. What she wants is the sanctity of her children. At first, she finds her force in our shame and dread. But when her audience is ready, her gaze invokes the tragic. Now a space opens between excitement and destruction. And a real, human other finally steps in. And so it would be, in Peter’s analysis. Once I thought I could never do what Peter had done. But the woman in the veil started breaking into our mirrors, and filling us with dread. He takes pills for insomnia and anxiety. I read histories, Vietnam diaries, I watched documentaries, war movies. I read the fiction of WWI, WWII, Vietnam. Our veterans were returning from Iraq. I read their testimonies in newspapers, in Operation Homecoming (Carroll, 2006). My eyes fill with wounded soldiers. His eyes fill with innocents, dying. I realize that these soldiers could be me. He realizes that Vietnamese children are his. In his sessions, Peter’s past and present are becoming inseparable in grief. She knows about him, he says, and she’s been protecting the kids from him. I don’t know if he is referring to his wife. Or to the phantasm in the veil. Or to real mothers who once cowered before him. “The burning children?” I ask. He sobs, nods, yes. Then he says, she always knew. “Your wife?” I ask, and again, yes. Finally I am made to understand his arrival, now in my office. There has been the war in Iraq, the atrocity at Haditha. Iraq reignited Vietnam; Haditha



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made his wife see him as “the beast.” I ask if his sons know. He thinks so, he is sobbing, “How can they touch me?” Still the veiled woman appears. She is no particular mother, and she is every ferocious mother. She is entirely unlike the mother whom he grew up with. Who mimicked Jackie and was flirtatious and glib and elegant and social climbing, deferring his care to sequential housekeepers. While his father moved between his business and his bar and his newspaper in the den. Peter has never known a protective mother or a tender father. If they had cared for him and sheltered him, he wouldn’t have been drunk in college. He wouldn’t have flunked out. He would never have been drafted, lost his leg, lost his men, lost his mind and his morals. At last, he really tells me about Vietnam. The way he went mad before the firebombing. His dream series ended. Dread fell away. Together, we evolved a more tragic worldview. With it, there was a sense of grief and departure. Time and history began to move again. Peter had wrinkles, withered muscles, gray hair. Looking back at him as a young man, it was as if I saw him for the last time. He was kneeling by a tomb of white marble and the shadow of a veiled woman rose out of the grave beneath and waited by his side. The unearthly quiet of his face had changed to an unearthly sorrow … the darkness closed round the pilgrim at the marble tomb—closed around the veiled woman from the grave … I saw and heard no more. (Collins, 1859/1985, p. 281)

Section II Childhood and the Heroic Imagination In Chapters 1, 2, and 3, there was an idealized register for collective trauma, in which the I–Thou relationship was eclipsed. Goodness was lit up by destructiveness, and the Hero was constituted by an Evil Villain. This opposition creates persistent conflict. Without some form of battle, there is no Hero. With that battle, there is no enduring peace. When we are locked into this system, ordinary goodness seems banal and disempowered. There is a diminished ability to see and know the hero who resides in ourselves. I have suggested that problematic Heroic tropes pervade our psyches, our interpersonal interactions, and our culture. Every time we release ourselves from these tropes, conflict is reduced and I–Thou relatedness expands. Ordinary heroes gain force and effectiveness. This occurs on the global stage and in clinical practice. To find the hero within, we need another portrait of human courage. Is there a form of excited goodness that retains its link to I–Thou relatedness? What conditions are required for its emergence? As a psychoanalyst, my search for answers takes me into developmental questions. In Chapters 4 and 5, I immerse my reader in the heroic experiment of childhood. In my view, children have a phantasmagoric methodology with which to meet danger. This methodology allows them to conjure and resist our Heroic forms. In play and fantasy, they construct an alternate portrait of courage. And so, I turn now to two ordinary children with extraordinary imaginations.

4 Fantastic Dangers Reality Meets the Edge of the World

Kate is in preadolescence. Her home is a place of warm social tumult. Dinnertime is an inquiry into homework and social events and school projects. Kate has a teenage brother and a sister in college. When everyone is home for dinner, they think, talk, listen all at once. Friends drop by, bringing more food and ideas. Until recently, Kate was a participant in this conversation. She was articulate and quick-witted. She made people laugh. Now she wakes with bad dreams. She is quiet and withdrawn and will not tell her parents what is wrong. They think she’s depressed, but they don’t know why. They remember her as a long-limbed, fleet-footed runner, red hair flying in the wind. Now she has stopped her athletics, and she is listless. I have a consultation with Kate’s parents. They are mystified and concerned. They’ve tried everything to reach her, and nothing works. Maybe she will talk to someone else. We agree that Kate will begin psychotherapy. When Kate comes into my office, I notice that she is tall, and her limbs are slender. But her body seems heavy, grounded, as if it is an effort to move. She doesn’t mind coming to therapy. She says she is willing to talk. But she doesn’t think very much of herself. She is “stupid” and “weak,” and everything she does now is “useless.” I ask her if something has happened. She says no. I ask about her nightmares. She says that she has them several times a week. For how long? About a year, perhaps two. I make some sympathetic comment. She is dismissive and bitter. She doesn’t want or need my sympathy. I ask her what she is dreaming. She tells me that someone is chasing her. She is fixed in place, she moves in slow motion. Who is it? I ask. She doesn’t know. But whatever or whoever it is, it’s catching up. She is going to be caught. Her voice is bitter, but she stiffens in fear. I want to talk about what is frightening her. Apparently, this is the wrong line of inquiry. She is prickly and impatient: “That’s a stupid question.” For several weeks, muteness alternates with self-flagellation. Eventually, what 67

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I get is this: Once she had courage. Now she’s a coward. Maybe she would like to tell me about that? She won’t tell me anything. Our sessions seem stilted and fruitless. My questions are clumsy, they are suspect, and they go nowhere. Between us, nothing is fluid. Then I stop offering concern. She starts talking. For years, there was another kind of dream. Bad people were kidnapping infants and children. They were capturing animals. Sometimes she was a child being chased, and sometimes she was chased as she rescued smaller children. She was outdoors. Or she was inside, in an enormous room. This room had high ceilings and white walls. But here, she was exhilarated by threat. Concentrating her mind, her torso became light, her long limbs longer, more fluid; at last, her arms would become wings. She was a shape-shifter: a girl, an angel, a flying carpet, a great and graceful prehistoric bird. Her wings would meld with her long robes. They were completely white, like the ceilings and the walls. She was untouchable, invisible, and she could fly. Sometimes her wings and robes were brightly colored. They were vivid, impossible to miss. The pursuers would reach out, and she would fly close to their reach. Then, suddenly she took off. There were children, rescued, secure under her wing. From her height, she watched her pursuers’ helplessness on the ground. She would soar and laugh and turn somersaults in the air. She loosens up and expands as she tells it. Her chest opens and her spine uncurls. Her voice is excited. And then her voice falls. Her arms wrap around her chest. She is silent. Then she tells me what she wants from therapy is a retrieval of her wings. Is it possible, she asks me shyly, that you can help me get them back? I think she is speaking of a childhood lightness, uncomplicated by the new anxieties of desire. A fleet, flat-chested body running without the impediment of breasts. I think she wants a social sphere with clearer lines and simpler solidarities, motivations, and intentions. A childhood which cannot ever be regained. I tell her that adolescence can be difficult but that it promises new experiences. Even as I say this, I feel pathetic. I’m offering her platitudes. If they’re meaningless to me, what do they sound like to her? She rolls her eyes, gives me that American teenage “whatever.” I don’t get it. I’m another adult, well-intended, entirely without imagination. She crumples down in her chair. Then she tries once again, reaching out her arms, so that her hands trace her missing wings. I realize, suddenly, that she does this at the end of every session. She wants the secret body, which once lived outside parental perception, outside of pedestrian, human forms. I ask her to tell me about her wings. “I already told you. You don’t get it.” “Try me.” “I already did.” “Try me again.” I’m probably useless, like her. But I’m all she’s got, and anyway, her parents are



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paying, and we’re stuck with each other. Now in her dreams, she cannot lift off. She freezes, she is frightened, she is useless, a coward. She is always and precisely herself: two arms, two legs, two feet, one head. I can see that she has no access to magic, no possibility for expansion. Then she says that she hates herself, she wishes that she could just take her body off. “All of it, or part of it?” “No,” she says, “all of it.” “Off from what? What would be left if you took your body off?” That she can’t answer. Or she won’t tell me. It seems clear, though, that there would be something left. Something would be liberated by the removal of her body. I think that this is a lot of chaos and self-loathing for a well-loved child. Something must have happened that no one knows about. “No,” she insists, “nothing.” She’s getting disgusted—I already asked her this before. “Why do you keep asking the same questions?” She’s surly and petulant, and she closes back up. I’d better not ask her again, but privately, I think she must be keeping a secret. I think she wants to go back in time, to a period of innocence, prior to some disturbing event. But she won’t respond to this line of inquiry. She is preoccupied with the loss of her “wings.” She has kept a journal. She’s been rereading it. While she is resisting my investigation, she is carrying on one of her own. She says that her life “got wrecked” once her wings were gone. She may be paralyzed and timid in her dreams. But from the beginning of our work, she is hell-bent, determined. Are you going to help me, she says, or aren’t you? Now she’s not shy. I see that she will not be placated by metaphoric interpretations or substitutions. She wants something else, which I cannot anticipate or imagine. In asking if I could return her wings, she was reminding me of “the child’s different-ness not only from what the therapist is, but from what the therapist can even imagine” (Frankel, 1998, p. 165). I want to analyze her fear, her self-hatred, and the nature of her monsters. Kate won’t engage in any attempt to remove her monsters. She expects her dreams to be populated with menace. She wants something fantastical to occur on her body, on her actual and her imaginary body. Failing this, she wants to remove her human body. To Kate, danger has phantasmagoric features. It is a parallel universe, contiguous to ordinary reality, inaccessible to adult reason. To have her self-respect, she must be able to enter this universe, and she must be able to meet it. Once she met danger with confidence. She could will herself into alternate forms. Transfigured, she could act on behalf of the self and for the other. Now her will does not work. She cannot shape-shift. Danger isn’t more or less than it ever was. But now it shames her. It compromises her dignity, and it is going to overcome her. Is it true, she asks, that if you dream that you are dead, that you are going to die?

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This doesn’t sound good. Sometimes Kate sounds suicidal or prepsychotic. I know better now than to ask why she might be dreaming about death. I ask her to tell me the history of her wings. She settles in, encouraged, about to tell me a good story. I, too, settle in. I tell her that I’m going to listen, and I’m not going to ask the same questions. Besides her dreams, there was another story—a play enactment begun in childhood. Her family had bought a two-story house. Her new bedroom, like the others, was on the second floor. Each night, her parents would take her up to bed, tuck her in, read to her until she fell asleep. But there were times when she said she would go up to bed alone, to read for awhile. Her parents and her two older siblings were downstairs reading. They were doing homework, visiting, engaging in boring conversation. She knows her parents are tired, enjoying this reprieve from chores and work. She doesn’t want to interrupt them, and in fact, she doesn’t feel she needs them. The absence of supervision, going up to bed by herself while her parents are preoccupied: This opens up solitude. Solitude is rare in this noisy social space. It is entirely dark and quiet upstairs. The second floor is empty, rich with private magic. She sets out. Her parents promise to come up later to bring hot milk and kiss her goodnight. She knows they will come up, later, when she is in bed. Kate enters the hallway leading to the stairs. She is vaguely excited. And she senses something ominous, waiting, on the second floor. I ask her to tell me about her body as she moves upstairs. Now that I am really listening, she is amazingly articulate. I can almost see her. There she is, in the hallway, the noisy kitchen left behind. Before her, there is the stairwell; behind her, there is human activity and sound. One foot, then the other, draws her up to the second floor, into its hallways and shadows, its halfopened doors. Familial conversation recedes, although it is audible, still retrievable. She can simply turn back. But her feet seem unable to turn back. It seems that they must move forward. Neither solid nor fluid, her feet seem rubbery, stiff. She halts, freezing, then takes another step. With each step there is a greater severing from familiar sensation. Whose feet are these, which bear her away from the familiar into the darkness? Right, left, right, until she is not sure if she has more, or less, than two feet. Bent over, she becomes a creature, four legged. Upright, she becomes a formidable machine. She cannot be sure if she is wearing shoes. She cannot sense the confinement of leather or the slip of nude soles on wood floors. She does not know and cannot look. But there is greater stealth if she is not wearing shoes. Barefoot, there is greater potential for flight. So that halting, freezing, creeping can shift at the vital moment. So that machine,



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creature, girl-self can all lift off, sudden, united, and unbound by gravity. Her parents do not like her to leave her shoes downstairs, cluttering the entrance to the staircase. Someone might break an ankle going up or coming down. She does it anyway. This is a family irritant; they never know why she continues to do it. They don’t know that when she arrives at the fourth step she must become a great-winged creature, beak fierce, talons ready. A ninja warrior, graceful in combat. A black panther: alert, muscles rippling, sharp-clawed, ready to pounce. All poised to save small children from the monster. Going up, on the second step, a vertical split seems to divide her body. Anterior and posterior. There is a spine still warmed by the light from the family room; a chest infiltrated by the darkness which is descending from the second floor. It is as if this small body was both rigid and sponge-like, a strange receptor, deflecting and absorbing light as it ascends toward mortal confrontation. This small body seems halved and halved again. There is the front of her and the back of her. Her back carries the trace of parental reassurance; her front meets solitude and lethal phantasms. She is young, and it is evening. There is an ominous quickness to adventure. She is anxious about what is lurking upstairs, underneath beds and behind draperies and shower curtains and closet doors. But she is also excited: There are kidnapped infants and animals. They need rescue. If she was small, she is getting larger: Going up, there is the promise of courage and adventure. Each night, she waits at the fourth step. She is alone, outside of, and beyond, familial perception. A bearded old man meets her and whispers an incantation. So that she can concentrate her mind until the ninja warrior, the panther, the great-winged creature all arrive. And then she launches herself upward toward the darkness at the top of the stairs. She populates this darkness with images from books and games and television and movies. The ferocity of the monster—a fire-breathing conflation of man–giant and dragon—collapses before her formidable powers. Babies are seized from his grasp. She scoops up small children hiding in the shadows. The monster shrinks and melts like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. Or he flees, or he is begging for his life. Because she speaks the language of animals, a pack of dogs arrives, barking at the monster’s henchmen, on the second floor. From Babe the Pig, there is a gathering of timid animals, tending children until she can save them. Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell lights her ascent. She and her allies swoop like Spider-Man, they strut like Catwoman, they zoom away in Batmobiles. The monster too has his enemy agents: the evil prince from Shrek, the wolf who ate Little Red Riding Hood, the Dementors from Harry Potter.

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But danger is always overcome. Sometimes that danger is evil; she exacts vengeance or some kind of harsh justice. Usually she is merciful. Vanquished, the monster is crying, revealing his own dark and complicated history. The monster tells stories of a once tender heart, which turned from love toward destruction. Contest subsides as it meets with his sorrow. And then there is a renewal of heroic action. Together, they will rescue small children from other monsters. And perhaps rescue other monsters from themselves. Now the fire-breathing dragon seems borrowed from Shrek. It is terrifying but lonely; longing for love, it turns into an ally. Kate’s fantasies aren’t static. They evolve as she grows. Around puberty, she and her vanquished monster allies start saving girls from vampires. When I hear this one, I have to stop myself from laughing. What fertile ground for a psychoanalyst! I think this must be about her ambivalent sexuality. But this line of inquiry doesn’t interest her, either. No: She wants me to just listen to this story. I settle in again. Her relationship to the monster seems very important. These figures have multiple shapes: There are techno-monsters and monsters which are quasi-human, quasi-animal. Sometimes they seem more like weather patterns. Their effect is that of an earthquake or a storm. Sometimes they seem capable of remorse. Sometimes they have no capacity for remorse. Their changeable shape has some correspondence to the changing shape of her heroics. Their struggle morphs over the years. Her imagination picks up and integrates new characters from film, and fiction, and the things her family is talking about. Several times a week, over several years, Kate goes alone, up the stairs. She likes to terrify herself. She is confident of the panther, the ninja warrior, the great-winged creature, the quasi-girl-self. She is confident that her allies will always meet her on the stairs. There now, she’s told me her secret. I mustn’t tell her parents. They won’t get it. They are worried enough. And she knows this “isn’t real.” She thinks it odd that I want to explain away her monsters, to defuse them. They are hers, of course; I cannot see them. I’m an adult, I couldn’t possibly see them. Doesn’t everybody have monsters? “Don’t you?” she asks. For the first time, she looks me straight in the eye. Privately, I’m thinking, “you should only know!” It’s a critical moment. She’s challenging me, human to human. Who am I kidding? I’m silent for a bit, and then I say, “Yes, I have monsters. I’ve always had monsters.” She’s pleased and startled. Maybe there’s a grown-up who will tell her the truth. She doesn’t want adult reason or false reassurance. There is always something lurking under the bed. If adults look under the bed, they usually say, “There is nothing there.” But there is something there, even though it is not visible to adult eyes.



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Kate thinks this conversation could become interesting. I have the body of an adult, but inside, I have the eyes of a child. My banality is morphing into shared excitement and fear. I begin to realize that she is asking primal, existential questions. The same ones which confront her parents in their daily work. I remember now that her parents work in urgent medical care. They take care of emergencies; they provide for wounded people in trouble. Of course she would dream about death and disaster. Kate has always been imaginative and proactive. She knows about real and fantastic danger. False reassurance won’t help her. While I’m trying to look through a child’s eyes, the clinician in me is wondering. Her play and her dreams: are these a form of mimicry? Are they an attempt to internalize idealized parents? Does she sustain this idealization through the manic rescue of her parents’ lost patients? And if her fantasies do have these functions, why must they be so secret? What has shattered the pleasure of this fantasy? Why is she so paralyzed, withdrawn, and depressed? I know better, now, than to ask these questions aloud. What she wants me to know, I’ve got. She doesn’t want to borrow my courage or their courage. She wants her own. She needs a wise incantation which will never fail her, when she needs to “move up the stairs.” She needs faith in her own shape-shifting. Once, she had access to social magic. She set out alone, and then she found alliances. Those alliances were the key to her heroic shape-shifting. Now she thinks that she shouldn’t need those alliances. When she was younger, she authored her adventures. She no longer authors this story. These days it is scripted by terror. She is ashamed, she is frozen. She has lost her imaginary alliances. She has lost her dialogue with the monster’s tragic history. Now there is only a contest with the devil, replayed once or twice every week. She moves up to the fifth step, inescapably herself. The monster keeps getting bigger. For years, she has been testing danger and freedom. She has been exploring good and evil. Ethical ambiguities existed in a pro-social field. Now there is no ethical ambiguity, no transfiguration, and no possibility of courage. She is alone in a persecutory world. She is “weak-willed,” she is “useless,” and “they” are winning. Until Kate went through puberty, her play was characterized by excitement, hope, and creativity. Her story evolved. Her identity was in flux, and her body could shape-shift. Her relational world kept changing. Resourcefulness took multiple forms in a social field. Her strength was informed by the capacities of others: She had a wise old man, Tinkerbell, and animal allies. Kate’s triumph was a collaboration. In this context, destructiveness was contained; “good” and “evil” met, and then they had

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a conversation. They came to know one another, they became one another, and they began to take action with a shared heart. Her fantasies contained grandiosity and aggression. But they also contained the complexity, subtlety, and flexibility of ethical discourse. They transacted Fromm’s (1964) death orientation, but they were devoted to life. They conjured villains and superhero imagoes. Courage was lit up by destructiveness. Then, her fantasies produced a widening circle of agency and empathy. But as Kate moved through development, her fantasies rigidified. They become compulsive and tilt toward a persecutory structure. As Kate’s therapist, I want to understand and ameliorate her suffering. As a citizen–analyst, I am interested in the vicissitudes of her heroic imagination. In the early dream-play of her childhood, the heroic is an elastic condition of concern. There are dangers which divide the world into Us versus Them. That division is then queried, complicated, softened. As therapists, as citizens and as cultures, we need to recognize and awaken this heroic. We need to ask why this capacity founders. How does it calcify into perennial conflict? To examine this question, I want to explore the heroic imagination of “good-enough” childhood. Through the analysis of Kate, I invite childhood to speak about solitude and anxiety; about alliances with strangers and the construction of social magic. In real conditions of danger, adults have capacities which are not available to children. But our strategies and capacities are constricted by cultural prescriptions and prohibitions. We tend to lose an important feature of childhood’s imagination: the ability to shape-shift in response to anxiety. In good-enough childhood, we construct scenarios of Us versus Them. But our categories of Us and Them are more mobile and plastic; they can readily shift, change, dissolve. Animals, techno-creatures, alien landscapes, strange laws and forces: These sites of alienation can become sites of identification, and the alien other can turn into a “like subject” (Benjamin, 1995). In the encounter with danger, the heroic emerges as a mutating field of social magic, in which diverse resources are empowered and shared. Villains are a terrible locus of fear. But they, too, can morph and evolve and turn into “like” subjects. In these phantasmagoric possibilities, the Heroic Other is reconstituted, elaborated, queried, subverted. In the transition to adult reason, many of us lose this flexibility. The more we are socialized, the less we can shape-shift in our self–other configurations. The less we can shape-shift, the more we rigidify our Heroic idealizations. We reify our imagoes of Heroic transformation and divide the world into narrow categories of Us versus Them. In good-enough childhood, we have elastic self states and creative possibilities; we have proximity to the



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irrational and greater faith in our relational fields. We trust in strangers; we are curious about, and open to, these strangers. We have zones of danger, which are organized as Us versus Them. But we have more elastic categories for Us and more ability to get to know Them. How does this capacity begin? How does it collapse in the transition to adulthood? Encounters With Solitude and Danger In preadolescence, Kate had an empowered heroic self. She had states of excited goodness, which were embedded in social magic. These self– other configurations were activated by parental absence, by the risk which occurred when her parents were not there. Every session, she tells and retells the journey up the stairs. Each session, we begin in the hallway, outside the kitchen. Everything opens up in the absence of supervision. She is alone, and she has a sense of excitement and adventure. In my view, Kate’s earlier fantasy play was unique, but it is also reflected a familiar developmental process. Children’s heroic fantasies often begin in this solitary transit to the “second floor.” Throughout good-enough childhood, there are moments when we are alone with anxiety. Beginning with attachment and separation, we experience parental shelter and gaps in that shelter. From infancy onward, there are holes in the solid ground of a child’s universe. There is a sudden absence of parental magic, which is simultaneous to the appearance of existential anxiety.* We have our first, “unformulated” (D. B. Stern, 1997) intimation of vulnerability and helplessness. In childhood, our mortality is often configured as a lethal phantasm. We conjure our first villains, we personify those villains, and we embark on our first exploration of good and evil. Consider the problem of the nighttime. A child awakens to pee. There is the prohibition against bed-wetting, parental disapproval, the bathroom “out there” with its allure of being good. But what distances must be crossed to reach the bathroom! There is the urgency of peeing and the wariness of small feet, suspended at the edge of the bed, where the shadows are. Are they down there? Will they get me? Can I run fast enough? There are talismanic protections: the teddy bear, the “blankee,” the night light. The parents are accessible in the next room. Still, the parental presence is not there. That absence suggests ominous forces, and it inspires our spirit *

Regarding concern, destructiveness, and existential anxiety, see Butler (1990, 1993) and Yalom (1980).

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of adventure. It takes courage to leave the covers and get back under the covers without being snatched by the monsters under the bed. And yet we did it. Our hearts were pounding. But we felt bold, masterful, exhilarated, and we knew we were good. In this moment, adventure and excitement infuse ordinary goodness. Alone, the child is poised between dread and the comfort of parental memory. Here, she experiments with danger. Mortality is formulated as a villain, and then a life force rescues innocence from death. In this experiment, there are persecutory systems. There are Heroic tropes, absorbed from family and culture. Children play with Heroic idealization. An all-powerful goodness is lit up by destructiveness; it outwits the Evil it contests. As Kate’s early fantasies suggest, these “hallucinatory chasms” (Eigen, 1986) are both pleasurable and frightening. They play with mastery, aggression, and concern. In these stories, there is an empathic response to someone’s need and vulnerability. Vulnerability is attributed to the victims of the evil monster. But when these stories evolve in good-enough childhood, there is no rigid opposition between Heroes and Villains. Need can also reside in the evil monster, who appears tragic once he has been vanquished. In this play there is a “dialectic of excitement and enchantment that highlights the exciting aspects of the good object and the enlivening aspects of the exciting object” (Goldberg, 2007, p. 261). Like Heroic mythology (see Campbell, 1949; Orfanos, 2006), these stories point to triumph and superhuman prowess. But courage is also linked to the practice of empathy and concern (see Kohut, 1972/1978b) and to heroic diversity and complexity. These stories are not dominated by the trace of personal or collective trauma. They are defined by existential anxiety and by the memory trace of parental love. They produce, test, and rewrite our Heroic mythologies. Uncertainty and Creativity In ordinary childhood, uncertainty precipitates this kind of heroic exploration. Because good-enough parenting continues to support the child during parental absence, the child’s existential anxiety differs from Grotstein’s (1990) “black hole.” Unlike his description of the “black hole of nothingness,” this space is not simply an opacity or a vacuity. It is neither flat nor entirely bottomless, and it is not a dead landscape. The “black hole of nothingness” is a traumatic register; it is more likely to calcify persecutory structures. In a well-loved child, existential anxiety is a state akin to Milner’s “pregnant emptiness” (1969); it permits creativity to appear.



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Defined and precipitated by the temporary disappearance of the good parent, this state is full of ominous vitality. It does not have the affectlessness which Green (1986) attributes to the zone of the “dead mother.” Rather, it is an anxious portal into the unknown. It provides entry into an alternate reality. This is a realm of experience which cannot be seen by adults, because it appears only when adults have stopped looking. In this place, affective states can range from mild anxiety to terror. But these affects provide a reprieve from stasis and predictability. Cultural tropes of Good and Evil appear from what Layton (2005, 2006) calls the “social unconscious.” Children absorb and enact cultural imagoes of the Hero. But these cultural imagoes aren’t static or rigid. They carry the responsiveness of the internalized good parent, and they carry the potency of this good parent. The resultant stories are a flexible conversation with fantasy, play, and experience. The heroic self is continually reinvented in relation to the social world. For this narrative to appear, the sheltered self needs to be repeatedly stimulated by uncertainty. It needs a periodic exit into mystery and adventure. That exit is parental disappearance, a lack in parental protection and supervision. Unlike the mechanisms of fantasy described by Bettleheim (1989), the resultant story is not an edifice of defense. Configured by hope and by the possibility of disaster, this story is the product of Winnicott’s (1953) “transitional space.” Here, an unrecognizable something can emerge out of the unsheltered zone of the nothing. Protected play is disrupted, sunlight downshifts into shadows. Tantalizing recesses of obscurity displace secure visible surfaces. This opens a new imaginary field, a “fateful region of both treasure and danger (which) may be variously represented as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island” (Campbell, 1949, p. 58). As the center of gravity is transferred to solitude and the unknown, the “destiny of the hero” is summoned. But that summons can only be received by a child who is awakening to the gap in parental presence. It is here that the generative Heroic narrative begins, much as the mythological cycle of the hero begins with unknown origins. In mythic cycles, the Hero was severed from parents at birth.* In children’s literature and film, the heroic experiment is often demarcated by peculiar forms of transit, recognizable only to children, invisible to adults. Through the looking *

See, for example, Abraham (1913); Campbell (1949); Raglan (2003); Rank (1922/2004); Róheim (1941); Segal (1999).

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glass. Down a rabbit hole.* On flying carpets. Wishing on magical talismans. Impenetrable walls open at the penultimate moment, as reason opens into magic. For adults there are no portals into this alternate universe.† Adult concern has prepared the child to take this journey. But it is the lapse in adult supervision which allows the child to perceive what the adult cannot. In this secret place, danger keeps taking mysterious and protean forms. The imagination yields the unimaginable; then the unimaginable is countered by imaginative forms of mastery and concern. To triumph over danger, these stories construct new dimensions of being. There is a singular Hero, who has superhuman capacities. There is also a heroic social field. Here, we find quickened wits and critical consciousness, elastic bodies and versatile action, and a collaborative ability to decipher the unforeseen. These capacities all refer back to the memory of benign powers. They refer back to the magic of parental goodness and attachment.‡ As children journey into fear, this magic sustains them. They are loved, and they believe in the relational force of concern. What children learn from adults is the sense of excited and empowered goodness. What adults can learn from children is an elastic sense of possibility: the ability to find “like subjects” in unlikely places. Children can also remind us of something else: that we can only recognize and answer unforeseen dangers if we can imagine the irrational. As adults, we often miss our moment, because our vision is constrained by what our culture allows us to see (see Chapters 2 and 3 on war and Chapters 8 and 9 on global violence). As individuals, as families, and as cultures, we need a plastic conduit to the irrational, so that we can shape-shift in response to the irrational nature of human destructiveness. Phantasmagoric Worlds: Irrationality and the Unforeseen In their phantasmagoric worlds, children test themselves against the ominous, the magical, the mystifying, and the absurd. They must decipher unknown rules, penetrate codes, discover evidence, find escape routes, translate alien signs and languages. As is evident in children’s literature and film, this is a universe of mysterious technologies, animated * † ‡

See Chapter 5. Harry Potter getting on the train to wizard school (Rowling, 1997); see also See’s (1985) discussion of Tom Sawyer. To Kohut (1960) and Siegel (1964) this imaginative play reveals the “grandiose self ” in relation to an “idealized parental imago”; this relation allows the child to be “led” by ideals.



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landscapes, extraterrestrial creatures, doors without egress, locks without keys. Systems and forces operate by alien mechanisms. That which makes sense in the “real world” keeps giving way to terrible forms of nonsense.* In these stories, adult “reason” collapses; it turns to madness; it becomes insufficient, ridiculous, irrelevant. For children danger is the unraveling of reason. As the efflorescence of global violence would suggest, adults have difficulty recognizing the irrational aspects of danger. There is a certain blindness which comes from our lost access to the phantasmagoric. We are often in denial, and we cannot admit what we are seeing, because what we see doesn’t conform to adult reason. When we cannot see, we cannot act. To recognize danger, we need an open conduit to “primary process.” Of course, a conduit to “primary process” would be of no use without a reality-oriented ego function. For children, there is a permeable border between “reality” and primary process. In the generative narratives of childhood, the heroic† is conversant with primary processes and it has exceptional rational prowess. Children’s stories locate this link by finding a gap between adult reality and their own phantasmagoric “real.” Kate’s parents don’t want shoes cluttering the bottom of the stairs. They are afraid someone will trip and sprain an ankle. Kate is meeting a monster. She is becoming a great-winged creature: If she can slip off her shoes, she won’t have any ankles. If she gets eaten, broken ankles really won’t matter. When her parents ask her to stop leaving her shoes at the bottom of the stairs, they are failing to grasp the “irrational” landscape of danger, and they are failing to reason from within that landscape. That’s what she is trying to tell me, at the beginning, when I ask my “stupid” questions and make my “stupid” comments about adolescence. It’s what she means when she is surly and testy and says, “Whatever.” For an adult to find her way into this universe, she must take a subversive attitude toward the known world. To help Kate, I had to stop translating her search into my own language. I had to embrace her search for her wings, without knowing what this meant. From the first, she insisted that courage would require the disassembly of adult reason. To meet danger, she needed a reservoir of flux and unbounded possibility. She needed a mutable identity and a plastic psyche–soma.‡ To Kohut (1960), this cre* † ‡

See Chapter 5. I use the term heroic here instead of the term hero because I am developing a view of courage as a relational field. Throughout this book, the term psyche–soma applies to the actual material and biological mind– body system, as well as to the familial, psychic, and cultural meanings and images ascribed to this body.

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ative potential appears when we can escape from the confining effects of the adult ego. To Slochower (personal communication, July 12, 2007), fantasy life is more vivid for, and accessible to, well-loved children, because they have a containing structure with which to tolerate and contextualize anxiety. To critical social theorists* this capacity would be more alive in young children, because they are not yet fully inscribed with cultural constrictions and confinements. Because children haven’t entirely succumbed to these cultural confinements, they can see alternate possibilities (see Chapter 5), which adults can only perceive in their dreams (see Fromm, 1951). Going up the stairs, Kate conjures her own extinction. And then she becomes a machine, a ninja warrior, a panther, a great-winged creature. She is Catwoman, Batman, Spider-Man. She lives in books, she inhabits their characters, she leaps into movie screens. For Kate, everything seemed alive, and there were no borders between the human and nonhuman worlds (Bettleheim, 1989; Searles, 1960). Action did not require a cohesive human form. It could enlist floating body parts and functions, it could borrow inanimate properties, it could situate itself in infinite psychosomatic possibilities.† Phantasmagoric Worlds: Finding Social Magic Before children are constrained by “adult reason,” these bodily properties and capacities can be perceived and found in a social field. In their stories, children conjure multiple forms of agency; these are located in the strange figures who populate the phantasmagoric world. Unlike adults, children seem to know that “the ‘bodies’ incoherencies and volatility are examples of the inadequacy of speech in framing enactment and embodiment” (Harris, 1996, p. 381). Children feel that they can morph into anyone, into anything, and acquire any function. They can also be in identificatory relation to a multiplicity of others, all of whom personify the bodies’ “incoherencies and volatility.” In this relationship with heroic multiplicity, danger can be countered by social magic. Children go to meet danger in a condition of solitude. Then they populate that solitude with a collectivity of figures. Together, they converse with the realm of primary process. They have plastic forms and extraordinary abilities. Their strategies are improvisational. They are not constricted by adult reason or by cultural templates. Imaginary children act without parents, with each other, on * †

See Butler (1993); Harris (2004); Layton (2005, 2006); as well as many others. Regarding sex and gender, see Harris (2005).



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behalf of “smaller children.” Each of them contributes a different kind of strength (see Rowling, 1997). All of them help each other in life’s great, existential adventure. In this collaboration, “the treasure of the imagination turns real in experience and the most dreadful version of adult power can be overcome” (See, 1985, p. 268). This type of heroic narrative can become a less “culturally intelligible possibility” (Butler, 1990, p. 333) for “well socialized” adults. If we are fortunate, we may grow up with a sense of community that is mutually supportive. We have enduring intimacies and commitments. Still, we are increasingly confined by cultural prescriptions and prohibitions. We put ourselves in a “box.” We limit our own possibilities and potential. And we tend to engage with others in “like” categories. In this way, we diminish the mutability, multiplicity, and diversity of our shared strength. We turn off our imaginative response to the unimaginable. We don’t form alliances with strangers, and we are more likely to split the world into Them and Us. Young children have more elastic signifiers for the self and for the social world. Where their imaginations are expansive, ours tend to narrow. We have a limited ability to recognize the irrational nature of destructiveness. And we have a limited vision of resourcefulness and courage. As children get older, their imagination is increasingly imbued with popular culture. Social influences expand. The fluidity of the psyche can be shut down by conformity and socialization. If we are fortunate, our responsiveness (real and imaginary) is enhanced by multiple perspectives* (see Chapter 5). But this never happened for Kate. In puberty, her heroic imagination lost its plasticity. She collapsed under the weight of a moral and relational crisis (see Gilligan, 1990, 1991). She hated herself. She withdrew from everyone, and she fell silent. For some reason, she kept her phantasmagoric Villain, but she lost her phantasmagoric courage. Arriving in psychotherapy, she asked for Heroic transformation, but she was also asking for heroic transfiguration. Social Compliance and the Loss of Social Magic By late childhood, much of our experience has already become what Schachtel (1959) called “pseudo-experience” (p. 288). Our heroic imagination is increasingly scripted by family and culture. Puberty is a complicating moment in this process. It produces changes in the body and *

Regarding reflectivity and agency in a “mentalized mind,” see Fonagy and Target (1998).

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changes in our cognitive capacities. It confronts us with new developmental problems. We feel arousal. We adjust to breasts and menstruation, to vocal changes, muscles, body hair. There is an increase in social anxiety, an increase in self-consciousness, and an evolving ability to think about ourselves thinking. Peers are everything, and peer networks become the significant social influence. There is an intensive need to be liked, to be wanted, and to be exactly like those we want to be liked by. Social alliances are vital and often unreliable. From one day to the next, we may not know where we belong. We may form deep and enduring friendships. But we often feel exposed, unwanted, and rejected. We can’t get comfortable inside of our own skin. At the very moment when we feel most pressured to conform, we are awakened in critical consciousness. We live in a force field of shame. We feel like everyone is looking at us and seeing through us. Braces can make us feel ugly. The right sneakers can make us cool. Everything is experienced with passionate intensity. We have acute injuries, ecstasies, and humiliations. We have dark days and great hope. We find ourselves in awkward social predicaments. Instead of taking pleasure in complexity and quirkiness, we want to “kill” off the parts of ourselves that don’t fit in. As Gilligan (1990, 1991) notes, this is a time when girls often undergo a relational crisis. They lose the voice they possessed in their childhoods, and they lose the sense of their own knowledge and perspective. They are conflicted about their sense of self, and they are conflicted about social compliance. As Kohut (1960) suggested, this time is also rife with narcissistic wounds. According to Kohut, there is an increased need for omnipotence and idealization, but our self-objects are unstable and difficult to internalize. We tend to oscillate between grandiosity and a sense of enfeeblement. In this developmental epoch, we readily seize upon myths of the Heroic Other. Our social injuries are readily personified as a Villainous Other, and we are desperate to conform to our own Heroic tropes. Our world splits into enemies and allies. The heroic plasticity of childhood begins to fade, and Courage becomes mimicry. We are captivated by popular culture. As we move into, and through, adolescence, we want to be our Heroes, we fall in love with our Heroes. But we are often tormented by our Heroic aspirations. Our daily lives are fraught with contradiction: We gaze “up” at beauty, bravery, and nobility, but we can feel grounded by the petty compromises of social anxiety. As Gilligan (1990, 1991) notes, adolescent girls are particularly disturbed by this sense of contradiction and compromise. All too often, Gilligan notes, they lose their own autonomous perspective. They shift into silence, invisibility, compliance, and



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self-doubt. At this age, both boys and girls are so worried about being “in” that they are often pushing someone else out. They participate in small cruelties, rivalries, competitions. They are fully aware of the pressure toward conformity, and they are aware of the price of this conformity. As children, we risked dangers which adults could not see. We had an implicit critical capacity; in play, we tested familial and cultural transmissions. In puberty, there are new dangers which adults cannot understand. We are inspired by Heroic idealization, and we are acutely aware of our failure to fulfill these aspirations. At this time in our development, we are at the brink of adulthood, but we often feel like children. Our Heroic landscapes are still riveted by fantasy and by existential themes. But they are shaped by social anxiety and erotic desire. As in childhood, pubescent fantasy yields the primal pictograms described by Aulagnier (2001). But these pictograms are increasingly controlled by Heroic tropes of Us versus Them. They contain a building tension: There is the capacity for mentalization and multiple perspective taking. There is the increasing pressure toward compliance and conformity. Insofar as the early goodenough parent has been able to receive the child’s adoration (see Bion, 1965), insofar as that parent has functioned as a “transformational object” (Bollas, 1986), there may already be a commitment to aesthetic and ethical ideals (Kohut, 1972/1978b). Self–other experience will include reverence, awe, and an attachment to the truth (see Bick, 1968; Bollas, 1986). And insofar as the good-enough mother has appeared as a separate subject (Benjamin, 1988), there is a capacity for reparation and concern (Ogden, 1986; Winnicott, 1954/1958). In puberty, these childhood capacities will be reshaped by peer pressure and popular culture. They will be constricted by desire, image, social need, and social competition. The heroic narrative of childhood endures; it changes, and it must change once again. In the stories of adolescence, fantastic bodies are still enlisted as “a way of making an object, for present and personal purposes, what it might be” (Baldwin, 1906/1996, p. 124, italics in original). But all too often, these bodies are enlisted to repair narcissistic wounds. If childhood was an un-self-conscious experience of embodiment, adolescence is the opposite. In our culture, adolescent boys and girls seem to engage in close bodily inspection. They scrutinize, judge, compare: How “good” is mine? How “good” is yours? They study their skin, their weight, their clothes, their muscles, their moves. They are always found wanting, in someone else’s gaze. At such a moment in development, bodily shame fuses with our culture’s vision of the Heroic body. Whatever our idealized Other looks like, that’s what we need to be. Whatever our idealized Other

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can do with their bodies, we need to be able to do. If we aren’t, or don’t, or can’t, shame becomes acute. Now there is an intensified need to claim the Heroic body, and that body must be a perfected object of desire. It must be perfectly displayed before the other’s gaze. It must be confident, always wanted, never rejected, and always capable of the Right and the Good. At this time, we all have a mild version of Kate’s crisis. We want to remove our flawed human body. We have an intensified craving for Heroic transformation. As shame about social dependency increases, heroic narratives can turn into Heroic chronicles. We want to be the Hero who acts alone, in conformity with our grandiose ideals. We lose the inventiveness of the heroic imagination, we deny our dependency on the social field, and shame intensifies our persecutory world. At the age of 9, Kate was constructing a heroic narrative. This narrative changed as she moved through psychosocial development. Prior to puberty, she shape-shifted, she was powerful, and she was good. But she didn’t accomplish anything alone. She was reliant on social magic: mutual assistance, diverse strengths, and multiple interventions. She was facilitated by the wisdom of an old man, the light of Tinkerbell, the protection of animals. All of them were using their wits. All of them were shape-shifting in their bodies. Together, they collaborated in prosocial care. None of them perpetrated violence. All of this referred back to the resourcefulness and caretaking offered by the good-enough parent. In the background of her early heroic narratives, parental function was just there. Listening to those stories, I could always sense “a lost world, (which) remains present, although hidden and waiting to emerge” (Hartman, 2004, p. 183). In the midst of anxiety, when received adult knowledge seemed useless to her, there were always new guides and allies. There was hope. There were redemptive possibilities, alliances with strangers, and a complex experiment with ethics. In these adventures, her “vigilance [was] spurred by the absence of a presence whose numinous imprints … remain” (p. 182). But then, in puberty, this imprint was broken. By the time she came to my office, she had a rigid vision of the Heroic Other. She was “nothing,” she was “weak,” she was “useless,” a “coward.” In many ways, she was going through the crisis described by Gilligan. But in Kate, this crisis was extreme: It seemed autistic, obsessive, prepsychotic. Was she having a schizophrenic break? Was this an acute episode of posttraumatic stress disorder? She kept telling me that “nothing” had happened. Once I took a subversive attitude toward my known world, she would start to tell me what that “nothing” was.



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Kate: The Ethical Compromise of Desire By preadolescence, Kate felt alone, and she had lost her heroic empowerment and complexity. She was paralyzed. She was without agency or allies. She was in a contest with the devil, in the hallway, outside the kitchen. There was still an ominous turn in the staircase. But at this turn, her strength was lost, and she was living a much darker story. She isn’t enjoying her terror. Her Villains are not containable or tragic. They are surpassing figures of malignance, and they never become “like subjects.” Upstairs, the monster and his henchmen are hiding. They conceal themselves behind draperies, waiting since daylight, invisible to all others. Outsized, multitentacled, sharp-toothed, fire-breathing, they are strange creatures, tearing apart and eating small children. She cannot change her shape. They have no trouble finding mysterious, malignant forms. They are creatures which then morph into bad men who melt through walls and windows to kidnap or kill children or bury them alive, or set fires or throw bombs or do something worse which she does not understand. While the television is droning downstairs, children will be bound and gagged, set aflame, screams muffled, knifed one floor above, or smuggled out the bedroom window or the door. The children’s disappearance will be discovered. But the authorities will be baffled. There will be no clues left behind for police to trace them. There is nothing comedic or redemptive in this enactment. But there is a safe zone. There is an agreement (reached somehow— when and why she cannot remember) between her and these adversaries. Once she reaches bed, she is untouchable, and they must wait for the next night. Each night is a solitary crisis with the demonic. She focuses her mind. She is on the fourth step. She is almost a quadruped, almost a formidable thought machine, almost shifting gears into the panther or the great-winged warrior. But it never comes. Sometimes it seems that the monsters defer their challenge because they are waiting for her to find a worthy shape. Until then, they remain invisible but terrible, impossible to contest. And she has the sense that until she sees them, she will not be able to find a worthy shape. And so she makes the mad scramble past the drapes up to the next landing. But this is not a moment of reprieve. She is on the second floor. It has dark closets, bathrooms, and bedrooms. These are the monster’s hiding places, platforms for surprise and attack. Somehow, she is not allowed to run directly to her bed. Bed is not safe until she has checked every space for a hidden monster. Her chest pounds, her head swells, she

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wills herself to look first in one empty room and then in another. Standing at the doorway of the bathroom, she is fixed in position. She knows that she cannot arrive at the safe zone until this is complete. Then she turns on lights, checks behind curtains, looks inside the shower stalls. At each juncture, there is no one. She has a moment of relief; then there is another freeze at the threshold of another room. Again there is a gathering of her will. Finally, checking her own closet, her own windows, underneath her bed, she jumps between the sheets. The monsters never show themselves. Arriving at her refuge, her breathing slows, her eyes adjust to the darkness. She turns on her light and begins to read—mysteries. For Kate, books do what this ritual cannot: Destruction is exposed through detection. The dangerous other is identified and made visible. Usually the murderer is a psychopath, who is rendered to justice. Sometimes the murderer is subject to vengeance. After she reads for awhile, she calls out to her mother, to her father, for a glass of milk. They always come. Bearing milk, warmer blankets, an affectionate goodnight. Then she awakens with a nightmare, which repeats the themes she plays out upon the stairs. I am wondering why a girl of her age is still so gripped by fantasy. I wonder why this fantasy is such a nightmare. She certainly misses something about childhood. Just when I’m really beginning to worry about her, Kate twinkles at me. She says, “I want to write mysteries.” I say, “This would make a good one.” “Yeah,” she says proudly, “you think?” She’s been telling me about her most recent ascent. A few minutes ago, her fantasy world seemed more real than real life. Now she’s ironic and pleased with her production. She is in this all right. But evidently, she still has a perspective, which recalls the perspective of her childhood imagination. I realize that she’s not really alone, and she isn’t lost in a psychotic process. She is deliberately telling this story to me and with me. She’s got the adults worried about her and intrigued by her mystery. She certainly evoked my anxiety, so that I would know what her fear was like. Now she’s letting me know: She is perfectly capable of a reality orientation, but she is having an argument with adult reason. She needs that argument to take a phantasmagoric form and to have it elude anyone older than her. Her “secret,” her solitude, her adventure into unreason, the benign presence of adults, and the inadequate understanding of adults reenacted the early conditions in which she found her courage. Unknown to me, we were reconstructing her early heroic narrative. We are also discovering something about the way her wings got lost. When I finally catch on, I say, “Busted, you’re not alone, you like to be mysterious, but I’m always there, at the bottom of the stairs.” I burst out laughing. She starts laughing too. I get a glimpse of



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the mischievous child, who once played with Good and Evil on the stairs. “Okay,” she says, “but you have to help me!” I’m not worried anymore that she’s cracking up. All of my muscles suddenly relax, and I realize that my own body is transfigured. Inducing fear, she’s been trying to tell me something that I really need to know about. I’ve listened to her story, so she decides to answer my questions, even when my questions seem banal. I ask why she dismisses her own courage. After all, it takes nerve for her to go up to bed alone. Why she must disqualify this act as one of heroic will? She doesn’t know, but I can see the wheels turning. I think to myself: Is courage male, does she need a penis, is that it? Or does she need a neutered body? I am thinking about pubescence and wings and adolescence and lost wings. The panther, the great-winged creature: They seem androgynous but female. They are a series of Amazon warriors, in which a child’s flat chest becomes a breast which has been willfully cut off. I inquire into her experience of sexual development. She says it was untroubled. She likes boys but doesn’t think a girl must have a boyfriend. She has had the ordinary flirtations, disappointments, and rejections, but she is okay. I wonder to myself if she is really feeling this. Frankly, this sounds like a pro forma response, a message transmitted by an encouraging mother or a sister. Of course, it’s a good message, but it makes me feel like Kate once felt, when I gave her platitudes about adolescence. The only thing Kate can tell me about puberty is that she hates her bra. It’s tight, she misses her freedom, breasts make running difficult. She pauses. Oh yes. When she gets her period, she can’t go swimming. Her menstruation is irregular. Twice she has soiled her clothes in public. It was awful. She was humiliated. She crumples up, deflates, and becomes bitter once again. She’s cringing, she hates this, she can’t anticipate her body. I say that her body used to feel light. Now she has to be careful. Getting her period, wearing a bra: These events make her feel “grounded.” “Yes,” she says, “ugh.” I say, “So far, you haven’t liked all of these changes.” She says she wants to take her body off. She says her breasts are too big. She developed before anyone else. I say, “You weren’t ready.” For once, I’m taking us into familiar therapeutic territory. Lots of girls feel like this, and lots of therapists help them get through it. Just when I think I’ve got her speaking my language, she starts talking about the monster at the top of the stairs. This is not the usual response to this intervention. I have tried to assimilate her language to mine, and she won’t have it. Once again, I sense an enormous gap between us. I also sense that something would be liberated if she could take her body off.

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I ask her if she still has a child’s body, underneath. She’s disgruntled; I get no answer, but at least she isn’t telling me I’m stupid. I’m thinking about unwanted changes in her body, about her loss of control, and the inability to shape-shift in her imaginary body. I wonder what this has to do with her experience of terror. The next session, she is telling me about her last trip up the stairs. I recall that her parents work in urgent medical care. Perhaps her preoccupation is linked to precocious knowledge of death and disaster? Perhaps she has overheard too much detail? She is in a more patient and cooperative mood. Yes, she says, sometimes she overhears them talking about things she knows they would not want her hearing. She’s heard a lot of detail about terrible accidents, about diseases, the patients that they couldn’t save. Sometimes she’s heard them crying. I ask if this was somewhat troubling. She answers my questions. She is polite, but she believes she can handle what she knows about death and disaster; after all, her parents save more people than they lose. They have taught her about team work, positive thinking, and rapid response. Once again, I think I am hearing platitudes. “Oh,” I say, “so courage requires team work? You seem to have forgotten about that.” I think I’ve got her. And anyway, we know she is not all alone. “No,” she says, “this is different.” She can’t tell anyone or ask for her family’s help. She’s got to make it up the stairs, overcome her terror, and find the monsters. I say, “No wonder you’re so silent and withdrawn at dinner—you know what’s coming after.” This time, I get the “whatever” response. By now, I know what she means: I know you are trying to get me to tell my parents. Forget it. Even though she won’t admit it, I think we are locating some longing for her childhood body. But I am still mystified by the compulsive enactment of terror. I try suggesting that the nighttime ritual practices for something real. She looks at me, like, “What took you so long?” Yes, of course, what if there is another natural disaster, a terrorist attack, another shooting in a high school? The wounded will require quick action; she has to know she can do it. So far, she’s not doing too well. In my assessment, she is overburdened by these preoccupations. But to her, this is a bedrock family ethos, and she does not want it questioned. She insists on her wings each time I try to query her obsession. I realize she imagines her parents as she wants to be herself: fearless and tireless, quick-witted, always knowing what to do, never paralyzed by fear or confusion. So I ask if she has tried to “forget” the times when her parents cannot save their patient. Perhaps she is ignoring the times when they feel defeated? Maybe these moments frighten her? She thinks this over. Maybe. But mostly, she wants to make them feel better when they seem sad. Maybe that is mobilizing her need to



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rescue? Or her need to rescue allows her to be like them? She is thinking this one over, too. Then she talks more about world events. Before, she was a child, at play with the problem of rescue and destruction. Now she is old enough for the real encounter. And the world itself seems to have gotten darker—it is fraught with disasters that surpass her parents’ powers. The war in Iraq, the tsunami, the hurricanes: There is a too much-ness to world destruction. What was tragic has come to seem evil. She needs to know she can act if destruction occurs in real parental absence. What if something awful happens and they aren’t there, can’t get home? I realize now that she is rehearsing the moment when reality rips through the protective, parental shield. Listening to these world calamities, Kate must realize that destruction can exceed her parents’ capabilities. She has never let herself feel what she feels about her parents’ helplessness. Instead, she feels increasingly pressed toward Heroic transformation. This pressure coincides with an experience of social shame and moral failure. She has grown up White in a multiethnic school. Like her parents, she has had long friendships which cross racial–ethnic lines. In middle school, after 9/11, Arab American teenagers were ostracized, belittled by her own friends. She thinks that she must speak up. She must risk being ostracized herself. But she did not speak up, she couldn’t face it. She hasn’t told her parents or her siblings, because she cannot do what she believes they would advise. “What would they tell you?” I ask. “They would just tell me to speak up, be myself, be honest, and it will work out. That’s what they do. And if my friends don’t like me, they’re not worth it anyway.” I think that this is easier said than done. It is great advice that probably makes her more alone. I ask how this feels. “Like, I’m a loser. I am a loser.” Well, there it is: her secret. Her secret lies at the intersection of puberty, cultural trauma, cultural and familial idealizations, social shame, and social compliance. Her social link has been severed, even as her body image has absorbed social constructions and constrictions. Her gaze is downcast, she sighs, her body crumples, and there are no wings in sight. For Kate, one ethical collapse implicates another, in an expanding future of parental loss, paralysis, and disasters. She has lost her sense of complication, ambiguity, and human vulnerability. She has lost her sense of agentic possibility. She “hates” herself because she is “bad.” She “hates” those kids because they are “bad.” Although she would never say it, I think she also hates “those Arabs” for putting her in this impossible bind. This is the unspeakable core of her own self-hatred. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have this problem. If Arab Americans didn’t go to school with her, she wouldn’t be struggling with prejudice, in her friends and in

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herself. Their presence escalated her Heroic imperative, and it made her into a Coward. For Kate, tolerance is an important virtue. Prejudice is split off, and carried by, her friends. She has contempt for them and for herself. Her values and her social world: These are a hollow simulation. In school, in her family, out with her friends, she is liked, but she is a fraud. She feels she has lost her parents’ respect without even telling them; she thinks she will lose her friends in any confrontation with their prejudice. Either way, she will be judged and abandoned. Meanwhile, she has judged and abandoned herself. Once the “monsters” had a tragic interior. Now she can’t empathize with anyone’s wounded interior: not in her parents, in herself, in her compliant friends, or in those kids who are picking on the “Arabs.” Before this, she was her parents’ daughter. Now she is undeserving of her family’s love. And so, she reproduces her ritual. She tests her Cowardice against Evil. She has been stuck in a story which cannot open into another story, until it is registered in a social incantation. In my office, Kate is finding a new alliance. Going up the stairs, she wants to be a real Hero, who wouldn’t need support or collaboration to “do the right thing.” A real Hero wouldn’t require “social magic.” She is stuck in a convention which insists on a hypermasculine, stoic, singular transformation that can defeat “evil incarnate” (see Frankfurter, 2006). This happened when she lost the body of a child. She was betrayed by becoming female. Pubescence grounded her as a runner. It complicated her place as a girl with the girls. It compromised her ethics in an era of collective trauma. Before, she didn’t worry about where she belonged. Somehow, now, all of that is over. She can’t do the right thing because she is too dependent on friends. So she needs to be Superman, who has no breasts, and is certain, and does the right thing, and needs no one else (even though he has Lois). Superman can shapeshift. He puts on his cape and loses the timidity of Clark Kent. He acts alone, on behalf of the other. Or at least that’s what she thinks. This image is paralyzing. Going up the stairs, there is only a truce which resolves nothing. There are enemies and a recurrent battle which must always be fought but which can never be won. She wants an iron will. She wants to need no one and to have a body which is larger than life. She can’t recover a child’s body. But if she could remove her sexed body, Superman might be discovered underneath. If he puts on a costume to find his own Courage, perhaps all she needs to do is take her girl-costume off. This percept of the Hero acts as a closed system. The earlier, “winged” Kate was the fluid, reflective “self” described by Meares and James (see Meares, 1998). She encountered the death world through her parents’



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medical practice. She played with that death world alone, on the stairs. But that play was rooted in the devotion to life. Simultaneously linked to the parents and existing outside of them, her dreams and enactments were a “solitary activity (which) arises out of an earlier dyadic inter-subjectivity made up of parent and child” (Meares, 1998, p. 878). This production was, in Meares’s sense, a kind of symbolic play which was inclusive of both inwardness and new modes of other-relatedness. It displayed a transfiguration of words and things that are taken from others and from the external environment into the words and scenes of the personal … a turning of the object into what it wants to be—the leaf into a boat, the stick into a man, the stone into a monster. What is essential to the selection and to the play is freedom. (p. 879)

The “winged” dream was a play object, neither inner or outer, but both; a focal point for contemplative interest (Baldwin, 1906/1996), ownership, and exhilaration. It was a forum for ethical complication, inquiry, and redemption. When she came, Kate could no longer play and imagine, she could only remember her capacity for imagination. She wanted a return to “the image of a … more glorious body… with lines sculpted as lovingly by … liquid gradations of light” (Hartman, 2004, p. 235), which could meet a “fateful event, a turn in human history that produced a disconnection of words and things” (p. 141). To achieve this, I had to be able to see her—as she had been then and as she was now—going up the stairs. I had to be both present and missing in the night. And so, together, we rewrote Kate’s mystery. For several months, she reenacted the Heroic chronicle alone, on the stairs. In our sessions, that enactment was placed back into a good-enough relationship: I understood, I failed to understand, I left her alone with danger, I watched her “take off” into her phantasmagoric world. I saw her body constrict and unfurl. I observed her cultural predicament, her fear, and the harshness of her self-expectations. I thought this would be enough to end her shame and isolation. It wasn’t enough. Then I asked her to inhabit the creatures which populated her winged fantasy and dreams. She had forgotten these creatures. I reminded her of the wise old man, Tinkerbell, the animals, the small children, the ninja warrior, the panther, the dragon who was both enemy and ally. How would they experience and respond to the problem in school? What could each of them tell her? Once, they had empowered her “winged self.” Perhaps they could they help her now? She scoffed at this idea, but she was willing to try. Every session, I had her look at her problem through their eyes. She used pantomime and moved about the room. She

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drew pictures in which her “I” was transferred to their perspective. Then she would narrate these drawings, using the pronoun I while speaking from within that figure. When she was at home, I asked her to write the “mystery” she was living. But every chapter had to be written by a different character. In every character, she had to find heroic possibilities. It was a difficult assignment. Tinkerbell was too delicate; the children were frightened; the animals were timid; the wise old man was too ancient to manifest force. They would be “useless.” The Heroic could only inhabit the ninja warrior, the panther, the great-winged creature. Still, we kept drawing, and she kept writing. Over time, each figure became the protagonist of the story. Each gathered agency and voice and illuminated alternate forms of courage. In this process, Kate was transfigured by her crisis. We queried Heroic singularity. Tinkerbell lit up new pathways to the heroic; she offered subtlety, invisibility, discretion. The animals suggested tenderness, patience, nurturance, and strategies of support, concealment, and indirection. The children gathered together, and they sought comfort. The wise old man recognized the irrationality of danger; he was the conduit between reason and unreason. Moving in, and out of, all these characters, Kate would create a new heroic narrative. Courage became multifaceted, it required collaboration, and it could take many forms. She became more flexible, self-accepting, and inventive. She no longer hates herself, and she has stopped hating “them.” She stopped exhorting herself to confront her friends and risk losing her friends. Finally, Kate began to talk about a favorite teacher, who might help her out. She spoke to her teacher. Together, they found a way to alert the school. They did this with effectiveness and discretion. For Kate, there was no Heroic confrontation, and there was no rupture with her peers. We restored her empathic imagination and her faith in her relational field. She came alive. I began to see her as she had once been: a longlimbed, fleet-footed runner. A year later, she stopped therapy. I see Kate occasionally; she has become a willowy young woman. She rushes into my office, hair flying, thoughts tumbling out. She has made the transit to adult reason. But she has imaginary bodies inscribed on her body. She knows that everyone has monsters. Sometimes those monsters can weep.

5 Strange Bodies in Strange Encounters Transfiguration and Inquiry

As a child, Kate would leave the security of the known world. She conjured an alternate reality. She personified malignancy and magic. In this world, Kate was in danger. She was alone, among strangers. She had resolute intentions, Heroic aspirations, and a received moral code. She imagined a contest between Good and Evil. But to rescue the innocent, she needed to shape-shift. Her body had to become something plastic. Her agency had to be tutored and sustained by multiple capacities and strategies. To acquire wings, she needed the wisdom of a guide. Winged, she could not rescue children without the assistance of allies. In her fantasy, she made herself larger than life. But that expansiveness was insufficient to danger. She had to rely on the “timid” and their “small” gestures. Going up the stairs, she had a Heroic “code of honor.” Rescue the Innocent. Vanquish the Monsters. Then, that code was tested by risk; it was elaborated in a conversation with strangers, and her morals acquired the complexity of ethics. Remorseful villains became tragic subjects, and heroic action took many forms. Courage was an adventure in solitude, but it was also a communal field. Then, in preadolescence, all of this collapsed. She was not in any kind of conversation. She was being attacked by her code of honor. This code became an absolute and pitiless authority. Stand up! Speak up! When she was in the thrall of this authority, her quest for courage was driven by the whip. She was developing what Bollas (1992) calls the “fascist state of mind.”* If she was strong, she would be able to obey her harsh internal master. If she was weak, she would fail to obey. When she was weak, *

Bollas is referring to a collective, political state of mind which promulgates fanatical ideologies. I am suggesting that this state of mind can develop in an individual, as a harsh “Heroic code.” The individual mind then becomes fertile ground for the ideologies Bollas is describing, and the code of honor is in service to fanatical action.

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she was the legitimate object of self-hatred. When others were weak, they too, were the legitimate object of hatred. She despised herself for her own dependency, and she had contempt for dependency in others.* In this system, willpower became exalted. But will was defined as unthinking action; it was divorced from critical consciousness. Her progressive worldview was transformed into a cruel and authoritarian structure.† There was only one course of action. There was no empathy or flexibility, no room to ask questions. She damned others for their compliance, while she exhorted herself to comply with her conscience. For Kate, bravery became monolithic: It was a brute force in her mind; it was a brute force which must confront the “Evil Other.” By the time she arrived in my office, she had less ability to reflect than she did in her own “prereflective” childhood play. And she had less compassion, as well. And so, she started psychotherapy. What she wanted was her wings. She was in crisis, and all she knew was an either–or body. There was either the humiliated, resourceless body of human Cowardice, or there was the Courageous body of the great-winged creature. But Kate’s heroic agency wasn’t just located in the panther, the ninja warrior or the great-winged creature. It was located in diverse bodies and perspectives. It was located in a frail old man, in timid animals, in Tinkerbell’s invisibility, in remorseful monsters, and in conflicted human girls. To resolve her crisis, Kate had to enter their bodies and see through their eyes. Heroic Bodies: Transformation and Transfiguration In moments of crises, we often feel like Kate: We are ashamed of our own hesitation. We are dominated by harsh moral codes. These codes extol the virtues of Heroic transformation: We must turn into Superman and evacuate fear. As individuals and as cultures, we have tales of Heroic shape-shifting. These tales have the features of Meares’s (1998) chronicle (see Chapter 1). The story begins with an ordinary figure. Then this figure becomes extraordinary: danger elicits superhuman powers. These imagoes excite and reassure us. When Clark morphs into Superman, we are exhilarated. But this excitement can occlude our critical consciousness. We fail to notice the constriction and the redundancy which resides * †

See Segal (1964) on the manic defense of cruelty. See Adorno et al. (1982) on the authoritarian personality.



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in this spectacle. In the chronicle, the Hero’s body morphs in conformity with cultural norms and conventions, and it instructs us in those conventions. It shape-shifts, but only in an unlikely and grandiose direction. Confirmatory of our personal–cultural omnipotence, this is a flawed antidote to human frailty. Of course, the Hero’s body appears to be plastic, adaptive, and expansive. It can do and be anything. But its possibilities are actually restricted to the realm of idealization: An ordinary body assumes formidable powers. Despite its surface of flux, this shape-shifting is repetitive and fixed. Change only occurs along a single axis: impotence versus omnipotence; fear versus fearlessness. This is a very limited instructive. When we are in danger, this instructive limits our possibilities and directs us toward impossibilities. We can see this grandiose prescriptive in many action films and superhero movies. We can hear it in our vernacular speech: “Stand up and be a man.” “You can’t take this lying down.” “It is better to die on one’s feet that to live on one’s knees.” In these expressions, the Heroic body defies fear by shape-shifting into one prescribed idealized position. Whenever there is an encounter with danger, this Heroic posture exhorts and excites us. We rarely notice how it constricts us. What if our problem can only be solved “on our knees”? If we weren’t so ashamed of “lying down,” certain problems would dissipate without escalation. To manage the unforeseen: This usually requires multiple, non-idealized postures and positions. To find the hero in the mirror, we need to relinquish this trope of Heroic transformation and search for heroic transfiguration. To do this, we need to discover and enter alien forms. We must depart from harsh moral codes and find ethical complexity. Instead of reacting to grandiose directives, we need to be instructed by fear. We must do this within ourselves and with the other. To help Kate resolve her crisis, I had her enter diverse embodiments and perspectives. I asked her to move out of her idealized mythology. I asked her to live inside the old, the timid, and the invisible. What did they know that she didn’t? How could they illuminate her problem? Through her writing and in the therapeutic use of active imagination, I introduced her to the notion of heroic transfiguration. In the work with Kate, heroic transfiguration was a non-idealizing form of shape-shifting, in which courage assumed any body; it could exist in any body, and it required an alliance with other bodies.

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Ethical Inquiry and the Code of Honor By engaging in this project, Kate could accept fear in herself and in the other. She saw alternative solutions, resources, and possibilities. She understood peer pressure and the tendency to comply with prejudice. She could think about hormones, and social posturing, and the effects of 9/11: She could almost understand prejudice itself. This capacity did not neutralize her beliefs. It clarified those beliefs and revitalized her agency. But she spoke less about “courage” and “cowardice” and more about what people were doing (or not doing) to solve problems. By the end of her treatment, the human predicament had become a focus for inquiry. Pro-social action was associated with a “Socratic commitment to questioning, questioning of ourselves, of authority, of dogma, of parochialism” (West, 2004, p. 16). When she was paying obeisance to an arbitrary authority, doubt had meant weakness. Now doubt appeared to her as an ethical force. Inquiry allowed her see social hierarchies, cultural stressors, peer pressures, intimate anxieties, and interpersonal knots. She talked about sexual development, and image and appearance, and she started to peel away surfaces. She looked for what was concealed underneath. Kate came from a politically progressive family. Her first concern was for the Arab American students, who were objectified by prejudice. But when she became free of the “fascist state of mind,” she could think about the aftermath of collective trauma. She began to think about compliant girls and machismo boys, who could not ask questions. To Kate, doubt had become central to prosocial action. In this process, Kate shed moral oppression and chose her parents’ actual belief system. She was fortunate: Her parents understood human frailty. They valued concern, dialogue, and compassion. At dinner, their children were tutored in critical social consciousness. Not all of us have such parents to return to. But if her journey was unique, it also points to a common predicament. In good-enough families, we all come into being with a received moral code. As we proceed through layers of socialization, we receive instruction about what it means to be good. Even when this is done with complexity (as it was with Kate’s family), this transmission can acquire an absolute and authoritarian aspect in our minds. This becomes more likely as we proceed through puberty and are increasingly exposed to social shame and social convention. When this transition is layered with personal or collective, trauma we are particularly prone to adopt the “fascist state of mind” (Bollas, 1992). For many of us, “being good” will be



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distilled as a harsh form of received morality. These morals tend to dictate a rigid code of honor: a set of abstract principles which is “above” real human problems. Instead of developing the capacity for creative concern, we emerge with narrow edicts for Heroic action. We cannot accept human frailty, and we cannot live in the immediacy of real human problems. We do not enter diverse bodies or multiple perspectives. All we can desire is Heroic transformation. We create a culture which keeps seducing that desire. In my view, the code of honor is foundational to our myths of the Heroic Other. To find the hero in ourselves, and in the ordinary other, the code of honor must be cast into doubt. From my perspective, creative concern is activated by testing, refining, and departing from these rigid forms of received knowledge. I believe that this ability relies on the developmental process of individuation.* This process begins in childhood (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975). It continues throughout the life span (see Erikson, 1950, 1968), whenever risk confronts us with the unexpected. Received morals are derived from the cumulative past. In times of crisis, they can be an important source of guidance. But danger always appears to us as an unforeseen present, in which the unanticipated is happening, here, now. Received wisdom and fixed moral principles: These can be never an exact match for the unforeseen present. To adapt with resourcefulness, immediacy, empathy, and creativity, we must be able to question what we have been taught. We must be able to see the value and the limits of our moral edicts. This is an act of individuation, in which we separate from the influence of our forebears and begin to think for ourselves. All too often, however, danger makes us less inclined toward this individuation and inquiry. We cling to moral authority, and we intensify our identification with that authority. The unforeseen present is made to fit the known past. Abstract moral principles are privileged over real human predicaments. We answer danger with partial vision, limited options, concrete thinking, and false courage. If we allow ourselves to be instructed by the unforeseen aspect of the present, the code of honor will lose its status as an absolute authority. As we begin to do this, our doubt can become an ethical force. We may come to see how power† (in the family, the culture, or both) secures itself through the transmission of our moral codes (see Belenky et al., 1986). We may *

†

Our own parents may or may not have made this journey themselves. They may operate according to a rigid moral code which has been received rather than constructed. Or they may have tested their own received moral code and emerged with an ethical system. Once again, I would note that a nonauthoritarian family can nonetheless transmit other cultural forms of authority, which shape this experience of a received moral code.

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discover that concern is actually missing from these codes.* Sometimes we follow received knowledge and discover its limitations. Sometimes danger becomes so discrepant with the code of honor† that the code’s utter absurdity is exposed. At other times, the code is loosened, and we have a greater capacity to see and cherish the dignity of the abject.‡ When our moral code is challenged by danger, we can have a sense of anger and loss. But we are less likely to objectify others and more likely to discover them. We are freer to ask who is really suffering, what they and we need, and what our resources really are. The wisdom we have received from our forebears can be flexibly integrated into the present. In my view, this capacity emerges in a continual, dialectical process. Throughout our lives, moral authority is being transmitted to us. Then that authority is tested in situations of danger, so that morals can become ethics. This process occurs through the medium of doubt, in conditions of separation and anxiety, in conversations with strangers. In this journey, anxiety creates changes in our mind and body, and in our worldview. We are destabilized. We find ourselves in alien states. But we also find ourselves occupying diverse bodies and seeing through their eyes. This offers us new perspectives. We have an increased ability to converse with a stranger, and we can recognize that stranger as a “like subject.”§ As our worldview is transfigured, we can find our own resilience and appreciate the resilience of others. We can see new solutions to personal and interpersonal problems. And social justice can materialize in unexpected forms. Go Ask Alice: Constructing the Ethical Force of Doubt “How can you go on talking so quietly, head downwards!” Alice asked. … The Knight looked surprised at the question. “What does it matter where my body happens to be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more head-downwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.”—Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll, 2001, p. 144)

To illuminate this journey, I turn to another story of childhood, which has been read to children since 1865. These are Lewis Carroll’s stories of Alice. In my view, these stories are unique parables of courage. They are generative * † ‡ §

Concern may be present in the content of these codes but be missing from the manner in which they are applied, for example, in religious practice. For a more in-depth look at this process, see Chapters 2 and 3 on war resistance. See Chapter 9 on mass violence. Regarding mutual recognition between “like subjects,” see Benjamin (1988, 1995).



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narratives addressed to children. They have the whimsy, wit, and playfulness of stories made up by children. And they speak to heroic transfiguration, as it occurs, throughout the life span. In these novels, moral authority is destabilized; it is replaced by social consciousness. The Alice books are “alert and critical psychological novels” (Phillips, 1971, p. xxiii) which test body and knowledge so that bravery is reconceived. Courage is not unthinking action. It is an insistent, autonomous, and inquiring integrity which will perceive and challenge the abuse of power. Alice survives danger because she is, above all, curious. She converses with strangers, occupies alternate perspectives, and becomes able to question authority. All of this is situated in the adventurous space of parental absence. She is sitting on a riverbank, after an elder sister falls asleep (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). She is in a sitting room which is empty of adults (Through the Looking-Glass: And What Alice Found There). Each story begins with a little girl who is well cared for and apparently well loved. She is a proper English school girl. She is comfortably situated in the Empire, and she reveres her King and her Queen. But there is a dull rhythm to her security. There is an excess of Victorian propriety. Her education is nothing but rote memorization. Alice wants to discover something else. On the riverbank, she sees the White Rabbit, scurrying along, consulting a pocket watch, removed from a waistcoat. In the sitting room, she muses on the other world which appears in the mirror. She follows the White Rabbit and falls down the rabbit hole. She draws close to the looking glass, and then she melts through it. Now Alice becomes “the reader’s surrogate on a frightful journey into the meaningless night” (Rackin, 1971, p. 393). She cannot go home. She travels through chaos, loneliness, assault, and invasion. She encounters the problem of being mad or bad or empty or invisible. She becomes the “alien other” in alien and hostile cultures. She is seen as menacing and as a predator. She is confused by strange norms, bizarre referents, obscure language and logic. Time has been “murdered.” Speech and animation appear where none should exist. She isn’t sure who, or what, she is. In falling through the holes in her known world, Alice permits fear to become a “camera obscura, a dark chamber, with a lens that turns things upside down” (Dowd, 2004, A19). To “right” herself in all of these reversals and inversions, she must proceed from “received” to “constructed” knowledge (see Belenky et al., 1986). To negotiate her bewilderment, she converses with strangers. She has consultations with local authorities, who pontificate in nonsense. She tries to distinguish puffery from madness and madness from wisdom, so that

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she can take the right turn toward social justice. The passage—through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole—challenges Alice’s most revered authority: her King and her Queen. In these books, Alice discovers that the British monarchy is as absurd and inept as it is violent. Throughout Wonderland, the Queen threatens her subjects with beheading, at the slightest provocation. By the end of this story, Alice breaks up the proceedings of a fascist court. She has been called as a witness to a crime of which she knows nothing. The Queen wants the defendant executed for stealing tarts. Witnesses are threatened with beheading. Their evidence is scripted, coerced, and suppressed. There is no presumption of innocence, no possibility of a “not guilty” verdict.* There is only the presumption of guilt and a simulation of justice, a mock trial in which the death penalty is inevitable.† Alice, alone, insists on due process. She is released from deference and intimidation. This is their final exchange: “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said for about the twentieth time that day. “No, no!” said the Queen, “sentence first—verdict afterwards.” “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!” “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple. “I won’t!” said Alice. “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. “Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”—Wonderland (Carroll, 2001, p. 157)

And as Alice calls them a pack of cards, their eminence dissolves. They appear as what they are. Their threats become hollow, and their dominance ceases to exist. Once, Alice was a proper school girl, who worshipped her King and Queen. What has happened to make this moment possible? Transfiguration and Bewilderment: Finding Multiple Perspectives Anyone familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland will recall Alice’s mutating body: the way she almost shrinks into nothing and expands into a monstrosity. For Carroll, the disoriented body signals anxiety. But it also rewrites courage: It becomes the lens through which new perspectives can * †

See Chapter 8 on counterterrorism and torture. In the Alice books, this seems to refer to the “summary justice” of colonialism, but this is remarkably prescient about “justice” under fascism, genocide, and religious fundamentalisms; it captures the absurdity of “military tribunals” in Guantánamo Bay.



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be realized, the site of resourcefulness and action in conditions of danger. In the beginning of Wonderland, Alice is trapped, alone, in a great and dark hallway. There are doors all around, but all of them are locked. A miniature door opens into a sunlit garden. But she is too big to enter that garden. She comes upon a glass table, on which she finds a small glass key. The key fits the door to the garden, but her body will not fit through the doorway. She must invent a new body. She returns to the table, and now she finds a bottle which is labeled “drink me.” She drinks it, and she finds herself shrinking, until she is only 10 inches tall. Now she can enter the garden. But she has left the key on the glass table. When she had the key to the garden, her body was too big. When she can fit through the door, she cannot reach the key. She becomes desolate, and she weeps. Then she finds a little cake underneath the table. It says, “eat me.” She eats it, and she becomes so tall that she can barely see her own feet. She can reach the key, but she cannot fit through the garden door. Thus begin wild fluctuations in size, none of which match her predicament; indeed, they cause her no end of trouble. Still, all this shrinking and growing will illuminate her problem. In anxiety, our identities mutate. We feel compelled toward unthinking action. We act according to our cultural edicts. But to achieve mastery, this impulse must be checked by critical thought, reflectivity, and intention. Received knowledge, unknown substances, the edict of the written word (drink me, eat me): These must be met with inquiry, not with naive trust and ingestion. When Alice’s shape doesn’t fit, her inquiry begins. She is weeping, and she is not sure who, or what, she is. She picks up the White Rabbit’s glove. She shrinks, and then, splash. She is swimming about in the pool of her tears. A mouse is also swimming about. Perhaps they can form an alliance and together find their way to dry land. As usual, Alice is unfailingly friendly and polite, and she puts her foot in her mouth. She chats up the mouse by describing her cat. She speaks as she would in the above-ground world. She describes her cat in the very fondest of terms and mentions that the cat is a good mouser. The mouse pales and quakes and is about to withdraw. Alice doesn’t want to offend, and she doesn’t want to be alone. She needs the kindness of this stranger. As she tries to repair her new friendship, her bourgeois reality shifts. Above ground, her cat is a sweet, domestic creature. Underground, Alice is not much bigger than a mouse. Now she can see her cat’s aggression through the eyes of its victim. In the same diminutive condition, Alice has an encounter with the Caterpillar. Once, she was an ordinary human girl. She would have

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looked down on a caterpillar, but now she finds herself looking up at him and to him. She discovers him sitting atop a mushroom, smoking a hookah, in contemplation: “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar … “I-I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!” “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” “I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar. “I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in one day is very confusing.” “It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar. (Wonderland, p. 55)

In this conversation, Alice seems polite, and the Caterpillar seems recalcitrant. But Alice has failed to recognize the guide she is addressing. Caterpillars are a mutating body. He is trying to share his wisdom: One need not be so unnerved by transfiguration. To Alice, this is beyond comprehension. Above ground, knowledge and identity were fixed. Education was memorization. Once, Alice was a “good student.” Now, she cannot repeat her nursery rhymes or her multiplications table. She wants the restoration of categorical knowledge. But in Wonderland, nothing can be learned without reflection, bewilderment, and meditation. Enlightenment takes mysterious forms. And so their polite and politely mad argument proceeds, until they both fall silent. Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said: “So you think you’re changed, do you?” “I’m afraid I am sir,” said Alice; “I can’t remember things as I used to—and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!” (Wonderland, p. 58)

More argument, more silence, then he says, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow smaller” (p. 62). She thinks: sides of what? He reads her mind and says “of the mushroom” (p. 63). He disappears; she is left with questions: How can a round mushroom have two “sides”? Which side would be which? How much of which should she eat? If her shape is elastic and her identity is ambiguous, who and what does she want to become? There are no absolute edicts here. To meet the bewilderments of Wonderland, she must think. Alice reaches her arms



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wide and breaks off two pieces of the mushroom. She nibbles carefully and tries to determine who and what she needs to be, here, now. In this moment, she starts to develop a critical consciousness. She continues her search for the White Rabbit. Throughout her journey, Carroll lauds the ideals of British decency, civility, fair play, and justice. But in content, style, and structure, he casts doubt on the imperial practice of those ideals. The stories he constructs are “both a denial and an affirmation of order” (Rackin, 1971, p. 415). As Rackin suggests, Wonderland “embodies a comic-horror vision of the chaotic land beneath the manmade framework of Western thought and convention. Alice’s dogged quest for Wonderland’s meaning in terms of her aboveground world of secure conventions and self-absurd regulations is doomed to failure” (p. 415). In this madness, Alice’s heroism is instructed. She has been taught to believe in decency and in fair play. But in Wonderland, she discovers that British “decency” is not what it seems. She is exposed to imperial violence and colonial subjugation. She has been invited to the royal game of croquet. Prior to the game, Alice comes across several gardeners, arguing with each other, while they paint a white rose bush red. If they don’t paint it, the Queen will behead them for planting the wrong color. As portrayed by Tenniel,* the gardeners have no human bodies; they are playing cards in the Queen’s game of dominion. Still, they seem to have a head to cut off. They possess no human names and can refer to themselves, and each other, only by number:† “You’d better not talk!” said Five. “I heard the Queen say only yesterday you deserved to be beheaded!” “What for?” said the one who had spoken first. “That’s none of your business, Two!” said Seven. “Yes, it is my business!” said Five, “and I’ll tell him—it was for bringing the cook tulip roots instead of onions.” (Wonderland, p. 109)

Alice has already acquired multiple perspectives and critical consciousness. She has seen the cat through the eyes of the mouse. She has seen the ruthlessness of the monarchy through the eyes of their victims. She is familiar with the problems of fear and abjection. The gardeners’ numeric, two-dimensional, terrorized “two-bit” condition rouses her to action. But she uses a covert strategy of quick-witted subversion, not the Heroic convention of overt confrontation: * †

Tenniel was also a political cartoonist. This echoes the conditions of genocide and slavery; see Chapter 9.

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude “You shan’t be beheaded!” said Alice and she put them into a large flower pot that stood near. … “Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen. “Their heads are gone, if it please your majesty,” the soldiers shouted in reply. (Wonderland, p. 109)

In the Tenniel illustrations, we see the gardeners head downwards in a large flower pot. Their heads appear to be “gone.” Lives are saved. Alice is not in trouble with the Queen, because the Queen’s vengeance is sated. The Queen lacks the capacity for metaphorical thought. She can be deceived by a clever visual and linguistic strategy, which turns the imperial command back upon itself. The day is won. No weaponry is used, and there is not one drop of blood. This strategy works because Alice has been transfigured. She has found an elastic posture and position. To remain faithful to British ideals, she must cease her reverence for the Queen. But her act of resistance will only succeed if it is concealed by a pretense of deference. From Scott’s (1992) perspective, Alice has turned the “public transcript” of dominance against itself. Here, the narrative utilizes the weaponry of the abject: a “rhetorical device which is manifestly ironical” (Dumont, 1992). This is a subterranean form of resistance familiar to those who are “forced into obedience and acceptance” (p. 142). These techniques do not fit the code of honor which dictates that it is “better to die on one’s feet, than to live on one’s knees.” In every way, Alice’s action is subversive to the code of honor. It subverts the authority of the Queen, and it subverts our conventions of Heroic transformation and Heroic action. It is creative, quick-witted, and inventive. It fights injustice and it saves lives, without using force. This scene is the book’s penultimate moment; it paves the way for Alice’s encounter in the court. She has made the transit to ethical inquiry. She has taken multiple perspectives. She grasps helplessness, and abjection. So that “at the end, Alice is finally brought to what should be the last refuge of order—the court of law … the trial is the final test of Wonderland’s meaning, … what is on trial is the ‘law itself’” (Rackin, 1971, p. 412).* Alternate Realities: Querying the Heroic Other If Wonderland casts doubt on imperial authority, Through the LookingGlass casts doubt on the Hero as Warrior. At the beginning of this novel, we find Alice in a well-appointed living room. Everything as, and where, it should be. But the room is momentarily empty of adults. Outside their *

See Chapter 8 on the problem of counterterrorism, indefinite detention, and torture.



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supervision, an imaginary realm opens up in her: What exists on the other side of the mirror? Can she pass through it? To the adults, the mirror is an unambiguous reflection of the known world. It is not a “doorway to perception” (Huxley, 1954) but a redundant parameter in which the unknown cannot appear. It constructs an illusion of more space without being expansive. Bounded by the mirror, this is a room in which the chronicle of the Hero has not been questioned. But to Alice, the glass is permeable. It is a gateway into mysteries where things become reversed. Shortly after Alice passes through the glass, she finds a book which is lying on a table. The first stanza of the poem appears in Through the LookingGlass, exactly as it appears before Alice. Here there is a book within a book, but it is inscrutable. It is written in a language which neither we nor Alice can comprehend. But Alice is more clever than the reader. She recalls that she has gone beyond the looking glass. She holds the poem to the mirror, and we realize that the print was backward. Now its reverse inscription rights itself. We are struck by her inventiveness. But of course, Alice has already been in Wonderland. To penetrate mystification, she knows that the reading body must twist into new positions. Printed “properly” somewhat lower down on the page, the Jabberwock becomes only quasi-comprehensible: ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogroves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

We seem to be outdoors somewhere, in an ambiguous world of strange creatures, when the warning is issued by a father to his son: “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The Frumious Bandersnatch!”

Undaunted, fearless, the son seizes his weapon, and goes to seek the object of danger: He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought … … The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whifling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through

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The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back.

Peculiarities of speech cannot obscure the son’s singular Courage, the answering paternal relief and pride: “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day, Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. (Looking-Glass, pp. 153–155)

And lo, we might emerge thinking we have understood: that the nonsense language has confirmed the trope of the Warrior–Hero. But this is Lewis Carroll, and he has taken us through the looking glass. This author proffers the code of honor, and then he critiques it. He has already cast doubt on the Crown. Now he casts doubt on the Warrior who would fight for the Crown. We return to Alice, who, upon reading this, comments to herself. “It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear at any rate.” (Looking-Glass, p. 155)

In the reading of the “Jabberwocky” poem, there is the exhortation of mythic dangers and mythic contest, and a visual and linguistic rendering in which they do not really make any kind of sense. One has the impression that the only reason the son goes to seek and kill the Jabberwock (instead of just avoiding him) is to triumph over his father, to then engage in mutual narcissistic celebration. So that combat appears as the entry into manhood. To Alice, outside this “phallic” configuration, it all looks a bit unimpressive and silly. Her response to it is considered, and measured, and dry. She is, after all, reading it after the monarchy’s image has already been disassembled. Unlike the girl in Wonderland who uncritically responds to the authority of the word (“eat me,” “drink me”), Alice has evolved. The written word, imperial dominion, the parable of Heroic conquest: These have entered a repository of ethical inquiry. In considering the poem, she is thinking for herself. She doesn’t get these “Heroics” even as the father brays his “calloohs” and “callays.” There is her confusion about the poem’s meaning and her clarity that all that is known is that “somebody killed something.” All of this seems like a gender-bender satire about the false



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pride of masculine violence. Which can, of course, be configured as a Queen or directed by a Queen. In case we miss the point of “Jabberwocky”, it was anticipated in Wonderland during the battle of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They must fight because one of them has broken the other’s baby rattle. Now these two doddering incompetents insist on going at each other with makeshift weaponry and armor. But then they need Alice to prop them up so they can fight. A similar kind of derision proceeds in Through the LookingGlass as Alice describes the Lion and the Unicorn fighting for the King’s crown. Like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Lion and Unicorn enact a battle which was extolled by British nursery rhymes. No one wins and the battle will start over. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion and the Unicorn, the father and son in “Jabberwocky”, the Jabberwock itself: These partake of the myth of the world-conquering Hero. This figure is lacking fear and attachment. “He”* engages in combat to assert “His” rightful dominion (Campbell, 1949). In their quasi-human features, Carroll’s embattled creatures signify the Hero who is vaguely of the human but “born” outside of human particularity, attachment, and recognition (Rank, 1940/2004). This is the Heroic chronicle which places a valence on individual will and autonomy, fearless rebellion, and world transformational contest. But through Carroll’s use of narrative distance, perspective, and derision, the world-conquering Hero (Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Lion and the Unicorn, King and Queen, father and son in the “Jabberwocky” poem) has been challenged. Transfiguration as Trickster: The Heroic Other Queries Himself In the midst of all this ineptitude, pride, and absurdity, the myth of the world-conquering Hero has been queried. Then Through the LookingGlass takes an even more radical turn. The Savior–Warrior arrives, subjects himself to inquiry, and proceeds to disassemble himself. This is, indeed, a moment of heroic transfiguration, in which the Hero turns himself “head-downwards.” Let us return, now, to Alice. We find her visiting with the Lion and the Unicorn. They are surly, smug, and fatigued from their struggle. They are terribly inhospitable to Alice, referring to her as “it” and as the Monster. Nevertheless, our heroine observes the proprieties and is attempting to cut them all pieces of a plum cake. Suddenly, the *

This fictive Warrior-Hero has already appeared in Chapters 2 and 3.

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Red Knight arrives out of nowhere and declares Alice his prisoner. Thus, the world-conquering Hero reappears in pursuit of conquest and possession. But the White Knight follows close upon him, to fight for Alice’s freedom and honor. In Tenniel’s illustration, they are a matched set of chess pieces, each the duplicating occasion for the other, marked by the hue of opposing teams. Both bumbling, clunking around in armor, tumbling from their horses, further articulating the Heroic (il)logic apparent in “Jabberwocky”: “She’s my prisoner, you know!” the Red Knight said at last. “Yes, but then I came and rescued her!” the White Knight replied. “Well, we must fight for her, then,” said the Red Knight … “You will observe the Rules of Battle, of course,” the White Knight remarked … “I always do,” said the Red Knight, and they began banging away at each other with such fury that Alice got behind a tree to be out of the way of the blows. (Looking-Glass, p. 134)

Thus proceeds a battle between “honorable” opponents who play by the “rules”: the one who must take her so that the other one can rescue her. But Alice is more put out than vulnerable. She does not appear in any danger of being captured, and she does not seem to be in need of rescue. What she does need is the key to the incomprehensible laws which operate the world around her.* In all of her encounters, she has been asking for translation. With the Caterpillar, she asked how identity can be formulated when anxiety is disorganizing the body. With Humpty Dumpty, she asked for the meaning of the “Jabberwocky” poem. With Lion and Unicorn it is the method for cutting Looking-Glass cake. And so, while Red and White Knights bash away at each other, she tries to decode the “Rules of Battle.” The White Knight is defending the virtue of a damsel in distress. She is a pawn in the game of the White Knight’s good intention, in the eternal reconstitution of “Good” and “Evil.” In this system, the Savior–Hero must keep rescuing because world-conquering Hero keeps taking her prisoner. After the White Knight seems to triumph over his rival (perhaps because he is actually kinder. We can see no other reason: Red Knight and White Knight are equal in their pugilistic incompetence), he offers to see Alice through the woods. He is, of course, being courtly and protective. While Alice walks, he accompanies her on his horse. As they go, he tells her one story about himself after another, bragging of his brilliant inventions. He *

Here, Carroll peels away another layer of Heroic performance and civilian desire.



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tries to demonstrate these inventions, but none of them work or have any practical utility. Ill-balanced, gesticulating, and weighed down by armor, he keeps falling from his horse. He lands “head-downwards” and is too cumbersome to lift himself up. Alice must keep rescuing him and placing him back on his horse. Here, she seems to grow again in stature. She seems mature, and kind, and sensible. She has never desired a Savior–Warrior, and she has never idealized her White Knight. She sees him clearly. She points out some of his self-delusions, is aware of his kindliness (despite his mammoth ego!), and seems to decide to leave him to his illusions. But we are not left to ours. In the gentlest manner, we come to know precisely who is guiding who through the woods, as he is supported by the very “damsel” he is rescuing. Through this portrayal, Carroll ridicules and critiques the mythology of Heroic transformation. But this does not just occur through the eyes of Alice. It occurs because the White Knight is given a singular portrayal. He is willing to be seen, falling from his horse. In this byplay, the Heroic body is revealed as pretense. It is foolishness, and it is ego, and it is grounded in social complicity. With the White Knight’s bumbling turning him head downwards, we are released from phallic archetypes of courage. His “purer” hue no longer signifies his status as the nobler, more triumphant, combatant. It comes to mean something much more promising. In his willingness to be seen falling from his horse, in the ridiculous display of his incompetence and grandiosity, and in his readiness to lean on Alice, he becomes a paradoxical mentor. As need and absurdity entwine with his braggadocio, he disassembles himself. He conjures the idealized Heroic body, he disrupts that idealization, and casts doubt on our imago of the Savior. He then interprets this reversal and inversion to Alice: “How can you go on talking so quietly, head downwards!” Alice asked. … The Knight looked surprised at the question. “What does it matter where my body happens to be?” he said. “My mind goes on working all the same. In fact, the more headdownwards I am, the more I keep inventing new things.” (Looking-Glass, p. 144)

Although the White Knight seems to delude himself, he is not ashamed to be seen as he really is. Indeed, he draws Alice’s attention to his fumbling. Head-downwards, after all, is the best position to in which to reconceive the hero. Now this is a moment of heroic transfiguration: to undo one’s self as an idealized figure so that a small girl can gain perspective, empowerment, and integrity. In their transit through the woods, Carroll not only subverts conventions of Heroic rescue and contest. He stands

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“female hysteria” on its head, exposing its social construction, presaging feminist critique of the “damsel in distress” (Dimen & Harris, 2001; Grand, 1995). He anticipates John Kerry’s “winter soldier” who gave back his medal from the Vietnam War. The White Knight disrupts the notions of Heroic performance. But in this dialogue with Alice, Carroll also points to the competence of small female heroes and he points to the incompetence of adult conflict. Alice (and the young reader) can stop deferring “courage” to the arrival of this Savior–Warrior. Instead, our protagonist can query the Heroic Other and find the strength which resides in herself. This reformulates Alice’s mind and body and permits her to interrupt the coronation at the end of Through the Looking-Glass. It also educates the mind of the young reader, who is identifying with Alice. Imaginative Memory and the Transit to Adult Reason At the end of each book, Alice awakens from a dream. In Wonderland, she has just challenged the kangaroo court. In Looking-Glass, she has disrupted the coronation. Now she returns to the comfortable universe of the sheltered self. Once again, she is an ordinary small girl. She is telling her dream to figures from her familiar world. Her eldest sister, on a riverbank. Her kitten, curled before the fire, in her sitting room. Thus, the small reader can be reassured. Alice has found her way back to familial security. But transfiguration and ethical inquiry persist in the ending of these narratives. Despite the dream ending (with its intrinsic skepticism about reality), Alice’s curiosity is very much alive. It is being spoken by yet another Alice body, in another type of conversation. Between her self states. Into the ear of adult reason. With a small and beloved animal who is imagined to be sentient. At the end of each book, the reportage of the dream insinuates new interiorities. All of which are in various states of heroic transfiguration. The dream of Wonderland is placed before her older sister, and then her sister sleeps and dreams of Wonderland. There is a moment between waking and dreaming in which the sister sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds—the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd—and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises would change (she knew) to the confused clamor of the busy farm-yard. (Wonderland, pp. 160–161)



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Then, in the wistful return to adult reason, the sister imagines a grownup Alice transmitting the story of Wonderland to a whole future of new Alices. In this, there is an ever-expanding series of new bodies. Risk and imagination; transfiguration and inquiry: These possibilities open up in the minds of future children. The adult Alice will be able to remember the protean reservoir of her own anxiety and courage. As these future children meet their “simple sorrows” and find “pleasure in their simple joys” (p. 161), the older sister imagines that phantasmagorics will reignite. For now, these phantasms are held inside the children who are nascent in the child who will make the transit to adult realism. They are held inside the mind of an older sister imagining child worlds, and child minds. The ending of Wonderland functions like Alice’s looking glass: Its refractions puzzle the material world, bending our minds and bodies and soliciting our curiosity. What will happen in succeeding generations? What is real? Which realm is really the alternate universe? We stop reading, but we do not stop thinking. We close the book. But we go on slipping down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. We keep falling through holes in our known world. In that fall, there is a promise of danger and the possibility of heroic transfiguration.

Section III Analytic Heroes: Finding Courage In the last chapter, Alice fell down a rabbit hole and melted through a looking glass. Her identity and her body were disorganized. She traveled through fear, ambiguity, loneliness, and bewilderment. She had conversations with strangers. She questioned her received templates for thought and action. She searched for an I–Thou relationship. She turned her fear into fortitude. Out of empty dictates, she constructed wisdom. From morals, she constructed ethics. She had a widening circle of empathy. She had creativity and curiosity. Alice sounds a lot like many of my patients. But she is also a role model for psychoanalysts. In psychoanalysis, we, too, have our mythology of the Heroic Other: an idealized analyst who has totalizing knowledge, technical perfection, theoretical understanding, and impeccable composure. This analyst lives on a pedestal in our minds. She has no fear. Her cases are never really in chaos, and she is never really lost. As we idealize her, we diminish our own courage, creativity, and flexibility. In Chapters 6 and 7, I explore the problem of the Heroic Other as it emerges within clinical practice, for the analyst and for the patient. When the work is dominated by the Heroic Other, patient and analyst will seek impossible forms of Heroic transformation. This will lead to deterioration, inertia, paralysis, shame, and ethical transgression. This happened to me, with Anne. But in the treatment of Rosa, we found a process of heroic transfiguration. Together, we entered into a strange encounter. We discovered the “hero in the mirror” and restored the lost generations of transgenerational trauma.

6 False Courage, Analytic Lies*

As a clinician, I have had moments when I have lost my creative concern. When I’m in trouble, I consult my colleagues. I return to the cumulative wisdom of my training. I hear the inner guidance of my teachers and mentors. Usually, I am able to change directions and listen to my patient differently. But when I am really in trouble, my problem doesn’t seem to match what my teachers are telling me. I keep trying to do what they have taught me, but I simply can’t do it. Or I do it, but it doesn’t work. The more stuck I am, the more the voice of my training turns into a scold. Instructions and edicts grow loud, and the voices of my forebears become louder than the voice of my patient. I can hear them, but I can’t really hear what my patient is telling me. I keep doing what I already know, even though I know that I can’t do it. I recall some regrettable cases, in which things deteriorated and became unmanageable. Eventually, the patient left, and I was left with a memory of failure. I had failed my patient. I felt judged and condemned by what Dimen (2001) calls the “real analyst” and by my own “analytic ideal” (Slochower, 2006). As analysts, we all recognize this predicament. We actually come from a long legacy of such crises. But some of our forebears actually used this moment to question the wisdom of their forebears. They cast doubt on their received “codes of honor.” Instead of becoming frozen, they took risks and embarked on their own inquiry. Our history actually begins in such a moment. In Freud’s view, emotional suffering didn’t respond to any known theory or practice. To develop psychoanalysis, Freud drew on the wisdom of his forebears, but he also repudiated their conventions. This attitude formed psychoanalysis. Why do we have so much trouble finding this attitude, when we, ourselves, reach the limits of knowledge? In my view, Freud lives on in us as a paradoxical influence. Throughout his life’s work, he praised doubt, but *

Portions of this chapter were previously published in Grand, S. (2003). Lies and body cruelties in the analytic hour. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 13, 471-500.

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he also claimed absolute authority (see Gay, 1988) and obeisance. From my perspective, Freud has left a problematic mark on our professional unconscious. That mark becomes apparent in the way we react to our clinical trouble: We oscillate between creative doubt and a rigid obeisance to analytic authority. I am in agreement with Harris (personal communication, March 11, 2009) that Freud remains a complex mentor for us. His contradictory attitude persists, and it bewilders us, regardless of our theoretical orientation. Freud was a hero, and he instantiated himself as our Heroic Other. We may think we have separated from him. But every time we are in crisis, we don’t know which Freud we should be guided by. Should we take risks, or should we accede to the authority of our teachers? What if we find ourselves in the midst of chaos, and their wisdom doesn’t work? Freud was not afraid to ask questions. His canon turned the nineteenth century body upside down. Sexuality became something plastic. This elastic vision of the body corresponded to theories which morphed throughout Freud’s lifetime. As an evolving dialogue with an evolving psyche–soma, Freud’s psychoanalysis was a departure from social and medical norms. It was an act of courage and an exhortation toward critical inquiry. Setting out alone, Freud fell through holes in his known world. He revealed the phantasmagoric world which exists inside all of us. His work was an adventure in that subterranean chaos. Despite his submersion in chaos, a “pellucid consciousness”* was characteristic of his style and method. His solitude was both reality and appearance. His model of mind was both social and asocial (see Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988). He wrote in multiple layers of conversation. He wrote in a private, reflective space. He wrote for readers who didn’t exist yet. He conversed with human suffering, with ancient texts and classical art, dreams, medical discourse, and cultural problematics. In this conversation, his method was one of ethical inquiry. In Freud’s work, inquiry is a healing strategy for both clinical and cultural problems. Throughout his lifetime, he was articulating his social consciousness. During World War I, he critiqued combat and questioned the European pretense to a “civilized passage of arms” (Freud, 1915/1963, 1920/1955). He queried the myth of the Warrior–Hero. He challenged the world he was living in, but he also promulgated its prejudices. Postulating id, ego, and superego, he traced the intersection between psyche and culture. Despite his own embeddedness in his cultural Zeitgeist, his work praised the ethical force of doubt. He destabilized the prevailing sexual mores of his time. *

See de la Mare (1932/1971), referring to an ideal preached by Henry James.



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His theories also codified his received moral codes. But he gave us a methodology which could cast those codes into doubt (see Rieff, 1959). Freud was a man of many contradictions. He addressed trauma, and then he denied it (see Aron & Harris, 1993). He ameliorated human suffering. But when it came to the pain of his surgeries, he refused to ameliorate his own suffering (Stepansky, 2002). His own Heroic ideal seemed to dictate endurance without need (Harris, personal communication, March 11, 2009). He created bonds of love with his patients and students, but he couldn’t tolerate (or theorize) interdependence. He extolled inquiry. Then he claimed that method as his possession. He severed relationships with students who embarked on their own inquiry (Gay, 1988; Roazen, 1975). He created hierarchical structures of knowledge. He held subversive views of the body, he praised reflectivity in the midst of anxiety and unreason, he placed culture and politics within the province of psychology, and he began to problematize Western Heroic convention (see Gay, 1988). But as Salberg (2007) notes, Freud also conjured himself as our Father. He exhibited compassion, but his life instantiated stoicism and the law. He gave help, but he seems to have had difficulty receiving it: He resisted taking safe haven from the Nazis until the last minute (Gay, 1988). We may have come a long way from Freud. But he has left us with a problematic legacy, which sits in our professional unconscious, like the transgenerational transmission of trauma. As Harris (personal communication, March 11, 2009) suggests, Freud lives inside us as the analyst who endures pain, in silence, and without needing the comfort of others. Even now we are still reading interdependence as regressive. Regardless of how postmodern we are, regardless of what theory we ascribe to, I believe we are all suffering from this edict: To live up to our analytic Hero, we must endure, in private, and in silence, without seeking the comfort of others. Certainly, we turn to one another for peer supervision, long after we finish our training. In this sense, we seek the comfort and guidance of others. But we never really talk about our professional failures. We are too ashamed. We are too ashamed that we could not endure, alone, in chaos, without losing direction. To succeeding generations of analysts, Freud certainly was the Heroic Other. But he also was the forebear from whom we all separated. He gave us the methodology through which we could do this. For more than 100 years, his work has been the object of critical social commentary.* This commentary is a continual act of risk, separation, individuation, and progressive knowledge. In the past century, analysts have repudiated *

Following Freud, each theoretical orientation has its own rich tradition of such critical inquiry.

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Freud’s moral codes and theorized ethics (Alford, 1998; Klein, 1946/1952), increased our social consciousness and our social activism (Altman, 2005; Fromm, 1964), widened our circle of empathy (Dimen, 2003; Guss, 2007; Harris, 2005), and enhanced our concern for the marginalized “other.” As our theory and our practice change, we keep converging on a recurrent question: How can we facilitate the I–Thou relationship (Buber, 1923/1970)? But no matter how we have converged on this question, we are still haunted by the very structure of psychoanalysis: our solitary and confidential practice, our asymmetrical relationship, our hierarchical structures, the need to endure, and the exclusion of our own need. I have no answer to this problem, except to try to tell my readers the truth about my own capacity for this endurance. It fails, I fail, and I lose my capacity for ethical inquiry. In this, too, I am not alone. But, as Leighton (2004) notes, we don’t talk about our ethical lapses. In our clinical presentations, we only describe those Heroic moments, when endurance transforms chaos. In the office, in academia, and on the social stage, psychoanalysts keep falling through holes in the known world. We keep testing enlightenment against chaos. Culture, self, and other: These continue to be illuminated by curious minds (Benjamin, 1988; Dimen, 2003; Harris, 2005; Layton, 2005). New theories transfigure the body (Dimen, 2003; Harris, 2005), and we have new windows into the phantasmagoric world of psyche and culture.* As clinicians, we risk being mad or bad or empty or lonely or invisible. We absorb trauma, and we take tragedy inside of us. We journey past appearances and travel through human darkness. Our minds and our bodies are destabilized. Just when we lose all hope of the I–Thou relationship, new forms of intersubjectivity keep appearing (see Frie & Reis, 2001; Reis, 2005, 2008; Slochower, 1996). Our methodology offers an alternative to unthinking, reflexive action (Altman, 2005; Grand, 2000; Layton, 2006; Peltz, 2005) in the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and political domains. We do, indeed, have remarkable endurance in chaos. In my view, some of our best moments have evolved out of disorienting encounters with emotional excess: in our patients and in ourselves (Atwood & Stolorow, 1994). When pain is acute, when it surpasses what we know and what we can endure alone, something new arrives in the system. But in every generation of analysts, we seem to pause before this awakening. We have moments of stasis. At these times, excess is occluded, and received knowledge seems absolute. When we are in this condition, *

See for example, the work on trauma and dissociation.



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every journey seems knowable at its beginning. Whatever we confront, we will be able recognize it. Whatever we feel, we will be able to endure it. Whatever we need to contain, we will be able to contain it. As theorists and as clinicians, we stop thinking new thoughts. We are more preoccupied with the “analytic police” than we are with real human suffering. Our literature becomes increasingly deferential, repetitive, and experience-distant. Our theories and our mentors: They appear to us as the Heroic Other. In our minds, our teachers seem possessed of superhuman qualities, which we must mimic but which we cannot emulate. As senior analysts, we may remember our own rebellious youth. But we may find ourselves insisting on authority, deference, and power. When our communal processes succumb to this arrangement, we mimic the more rigid aspects of Freud’s character. We lose the vitality of our method. We only converse with those who are “like” us, and we avoid discrepant experiences and perspectives. Whenever pain begins to spill outside our familiar containers, we tend to ignore it. All matters of the mind seem explicable, and we have forgotten the other Freud: the one who valued creative doubt and concern. In their encounters with human suffering, our teachers developed edgy, evocative formulations for that which was unendurable and excessive: to themselves and to their patients. Now these formulations are familiar: narcissist and borderline phenomena, splitting and projective identification, developmental arrest, empathic immersion, participant observation, self states, dissociation, enactment, multiplicity, and so on. Once these concepts were revolutionary. But if our mentors’ work is installed as authoritative knowledge, these terms can become the locus of our deference. They start to perseverate and lose their meaning (see Grand, 2000, on constructivism; Grand, 2002, on dissociation). They seem to empty out* the very wilderness which they once described. The “raw” has been “cooked.” We find ourselves studying a mind which has lost its mystery. In such periods, we make ourselves safe from “nature’s dreaded forces” and “those great necessities of fate against which there is no remedy” (Freud, 1927/1953, p. 38). We are at greater and greater distances from unconscious chaos. When we exclude our own need and our own bewilderment, we also tend to exclude the unendurable edge of human suffering. Our texts (and our clinical narratives) become a theater for what I have called “redundant speech” (Grand, 2002). We tend to lose our conduit *

See, for example, my critique of the generic application of “trauma” and “dissociation” in Grand (2002).

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to adventure. We aren’t living in the unforeseen present. We may appear to query the psyche–soma, but the body will cease to be a “doorway to perception.” It becomes an unambiguous reflection of the known world.* Once this condition is reached, analysts cannot fall down the rabbit hole or melt through the looking glass. We can only ask questions which have already been answered. When this type of stasis enters the clinical setting, we start to sacrifice our patient. We cannot be transfigured by danger. We are compelled by Heroic transformation. We are driven by false notions of courage, and ultimately we sacrifice ourselves. Maternal Chronicles: Moral Codes and Good Breasts At different moments in my analytic career, received wisdom has acquired this authoritarian aspect. Instead of pursuing an ethical inquiry with my patient, I followed the dictates of my analytic Hero. The result wasn’t pretty. Most of my colleagues have experienced this predicament. It is important for us to illuminate this process. To do this, we must dismiss the “analytic police” and discuss our failures and transgressions (see also Slochower, 2003). And so, I begin with the first failure that haunts my clinical memory. It was, in part, the product of naïveté, sex roles, and lack of training. But in some other form, it could happen today, because it was also the product of its cultural Zeitgeist. In every cultural Zeitgeist, our beliefs can become a system of command, will, and obeisance. When I met Anne, I was beginning my psychoanalytic training. To me, psychoanalysis seemed to be in a state of fulfillment. Neurotic conflict had been upstaged by an interest in developmental arrest. This turn could be traced through self psychology, ego psychology, British object relations, and the interpersonal theories of Searles and Sullivan. Disparate theories had converged on the infant dyad. Psychic pain had become inseparable from the body, and the intrapsychic was becoming inseparable from the interpersonal. Transference analysis was focusing on the infant–mother. With the patient as infant, women analysts mothered and the very best male analysts (e.g., Ghent, Lachmann, Winnicott) mothered (Ghent, 1990, 1992; Winnicott, 1954/1958). When conflict surfaced, there was always Oedipal analysis. At that time, it seemed that every layer of my patient could be known, met, cured. This was what I knew about psychoanalysis: *

I would argue that this could happen even in an era of gender, feminist, and queer theory, if such theories reach the status of received knowledge.



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Infants were a “blank slate,” their needs universal. Emotional health was produced by “good-enough” provision: by “holding,” “containment,” and proper attunement. There was no field of mutual influence (Aron, 1996), no “two-person” psychology, no maternal subjectivity (Benjamin, 1988),* no critique of this “developmental tilt” (Mitchell, 1988), and there was little deconstruction of sex and gender. These influences were gestating, but I didn’t know it. Unfamiliar with interpersonal psychoanalysis, I believed that a well-analyzed analyst had little, or no, countertransference. As a beginning woman analyst, there was only one legitimate position and embodiment: I had to be the Good Breast. Anne and I would both have trouble with this maternal Hero, but I couldn’t know it. She was one of my first patients in private practice. I thought she was exactly the kind of patient I wanted. She could pay. She wanted frequency. Elegant, insightful, sophisticated, she had friends, family, professional success. What she wanted was intimacy with a man. With a man she was a cipher. She had not had sex, and she had not had sexual desire. Not with a woman, not with a man, nor even with her own body. In her body she wanted nothing. Socially and professionally, she wanted. But this wanting was without respite or stillness, release or abatement. She seemed to sell herself rather than to discover herself, to collect and exploit others rather than to know them. She could be ruthless in the pursuit of status and ambition. Each new increment of power was a platform from which to grasp at another. Her hunger was as vast as it was unfulfilled, and it was entirely separated from erotic desire. During social encounters with a man, she was contemptuous. Useful for “male chores,” men were scrutinized, reduced, discarded. And yet she thought that what she wanted was to want one. Her friends were getting married. She was over thirty. In the passage of time, she had become a marginalized witness to romantic coupling. She craved the ordinary nucleus of home, husband, children. At that time, no other life style was really legitimate, or “healthy.” She knew that marriage was acquired through the conduit of human passion. Often, she spoke of a man as if he was a social acquisition. Adequate sexual function was simply the venue for his capture. But then objectification would shift into melancholy. She would anticipate a lifetime of loneliness, locked out of intimacy by her fear and contempt. In the second consultation she said she was looking for a heterosexual woman therapist who believed in intimacy with a man. She noted that *

Winnicott, our idealized “maternal analyst,” had already described maternal ambivalence, but I didn’t know it.

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I was married; she thought that I knew about a man’s loving potential. Then she said that she would need a flexible treatment structure. Would I allow occasional phone contact, longer sessions, extra sessions if the work became particularly painful? She would pay for these and not overuse them. She asked in the voice of sanity and reason. She said that her father had been repugnant. But her mother and grandmother had been figures of comfort. As with her maternal objects, Anne’s need of me would not be excessive. In this, she seemed forthright and direct. I am usually tender and flexible in response to need and vulnerability. But when she asked me to expand my parameters, something in me was reluctant. I wanted to be nurturant. And it seemed that she wanted to be nurtured. But I felt some resistance. Anne seemed like a “good baby” who was asking for the “good breast.” But what she showed me was some flaw in our maternal Hero. For Anne, disintegration was imminent in her bodily hunger. Preconsciously, she believed that desire unleashed would escalate into craving, and craving would become hatred, until craving and hatred consumed both herself and the other. If the universe remained peopled, if she remained sane within that universe, it was because she engaged in the undoing of desire. Insofar as I recognized my patient, I recognized her through my own reluctance. I immediately disliked her contempt and her voraciousness. I did not trust her. But I could not dislike her. My own Heroic imago prohibited this feeling; I could not permit myself to know what I was feeling. It was the mid-1970s. I had just begun my analytic training. I thought that the good analyst must emulate a limitless maternal gaze. I knew something about “mirroring” and “holding” and “empathy” and “regression” and “evenly hovering attention.” I loved the British object relationalists. I was a woman, long tutored in receptivity, nurturance, and acceptance. And so I thought that in the healing couple, the analyst must ready herself to be consumed. I must be dispossessed of limits and boundaries and judgments and autonomous human subjectivity. I was taught that the analyzed “real analyst” (Dimen, 2001) had sublimated human passion; she was void of all but the most transient countertransference. Provocation must be neutralized and must never incite her. To meet contempt and voracity with the answering hard edge of boundedness and assertion (see Grand, 2000; Lionells, personal communication October 12, 1998; Slochower, 1996), to conceive of such a meeting as therapeutic facilitation and containment: This was culturally inaccessible to an aspiring woman analyst. Men did it. There were experienced women analysts who did it. But in an era of fairly rigid gender politics, these senior women analysts



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were often seen as controlling “phallic women.” They were secure enough to risk their feminine identification. I was not. I did not discover these role models until later in my training. If I had encountered them earlier, I could not have taken them as my role model. When I began my practice, I was captive to a series of gendered splits and idealizations, even though I would have said I was a feminist. Maternal containment, maternal bounty, good breast, woman analyst, enduring monogamous love: These things could not be subjected to doubt. I did not like Anne. But dislike was discrepant with the limitless maternal gaze. Dislike was excised from my consciousness as quickly as it awakened. I relinquished authenticity and perception. I could not meet my patient. She asked for an expansion of our frame. I did not wonder what she was really asking me. Or what answer she was really seeking. From the first, there was no curiosity or reflectivity. When she asked me for extra contacts, I just said yes. But what I really meant was no. By the second session, my tender receptivity had expired. I had already begun to avert my gaze. If she had foreknowledge of her escalating hunger, I had foreknowledge of spiraling depletion. In truth, I did not want disrupted, fluctuating structure, and I did not want to work on the telephone. I didn’t want to “mother” a demanding “infant.” And yet I volunteered service on demand. I was unfamiliar with character analysis and with the concepts of projective identification or participant observation. I could not use these conceptions to make meaning of induced dislike. Of course, Winnicott had already written about maternal ambivalence and hate in the countertransference. But I didn’t know that literature, and anyway, it might have disrupted my idealization. I did know the classical strictures about the maintenance of the “frame.” I could have used them to shield me from intrusion. But the rigidity of these strictures was antithetical to my vision of maternal bounty and provision. A strong frame was required. But for me, the imposition of boundaries was phallic and authoritarian. It was a form of male relational distance. It was not a therapeutic container but an exposure of feminine failure. Boundaries were a borrowed phallus, a theft necessitated by “Bad Breast” affects which should not exist in the maternal–analytic relation. And so, I could not interpret Anne’s requests, defer her question, or refuse her. It never occurred to me that the request for a flexible frame might be a request for a more flexible look at our shared maternal myth. Or that it was a request for a sexed and gendered body which could be turned inside out and upside down. In this area, I had no language for critical inquiry. Double binded within, double binded in the culture, I was double binding in the initial transactions with my patient. I created a paradoxical frame.

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And I needed her to read that paradox with acuity and precision. I wanted her to think she could ask for the Good Breast and to know not to ask me. I wanted her to imagine my nurturance and to be sated in imagination. I did not want real requests trespassing on my fictive generosity. I did not want to be encountered in my reluctance, because that reluctance challenged the myth of the maternal gaze. If I created a paradoxical frame, she countered this paradox with one of her own. She needed my dislike so that she could be known, but she needed to be shielded from knowing I disliked her. From the first, our mutual goodness was predicated on falsehood, on the illusion of feeding, and on the illusion of being fed. And so it would become an analysis articulated by fraudulence. She wanted a dynamic psychotherapy. I wanted an analytic patient. We thought that we had found one another. But we lost one another. Ultimately, we could only know each other through the quality of our lies. We solicited lies. We told our lies and we saw each other lying, until a certain knowing mendacity would become our only truth (see Ogden, l997). This enactment of maternal duplicity would awaken in her an unwanted memory of a mother who did not want her. In truth, there was no idyllic breast. And there was no infant who had been sated. Anne told stories of her mother, her father, her grandmother. In these stories, mothers were good, and the father was bad. In the space between herself and her father, there was nothing but contempt: for his working-class hands and the ignorance of his speech, for his sweat, and for the vulgarity of his clothes. His hat fell upon the kitchen table as his footfall fell upon the stairs: malign, invasive, repugnant. There was something inexplicable about this hatred. I didn’t think, at that time, about the prejudices of class. I wondered if Anne’s hate suggested an old betrayal or violation. I could not find any other explanation for such relentless loathing. But in the course of her treatment, there was nothing to tell me. There was never any evidence of his badness. To Anne, repulsion was inherent in his voice, in the clumsiness of his hands. His defects were self-evident, and she expected to see them mirrored in my disgust. But what emerged was a decent man. He left for work, came home, sat quietly at the kitchen table, read, conversed little, slept, and left for work in the morning. He was solid, he was steady, and he would not be provoked. He was neither withdrawn nor present, but offered himself in a kind of shy availability. But there was no one there who would receive his kindness. And so he went his own way, with a quiet loneliness. If there was no evidence of the father’s badness, so there was no evidence of the mother’s goodness. I asked her to tell me of her mother (and grandmother’s) nurturance. There was a plenitude of stories. But where



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the paternal portrait seemed simple, the maternal portrait was complex. It is true that her mother provided; it is true that Anne shared her daily life with her mother. She “told her mother everything” and was met with emotional exclaim. She was her mother’s confidant, particularly about the mother’s marital disappointments. Bitter about her rural existence, this was a woman who felt that she had married “beneath her.” There was an unspoken implication that mother had married because of a foolish girlhood passion. Her disappointed ambitions were fixated on my patient. What Anne thought of as maternal nurturance was coercive, guilt inducing, and demanding of endless gratitude. Nurturance was predicated on the fulfillment of mother’s ambition and on the exclusion and devaluation of the father. Anne lived under the threat of maternal withdrawal if she were “caught” turning to the father. But she also had to marry “up.” Anne never noticed these contradictions. She had no class consciousness, and I didn’t have very much then, either. And she was denying her own dislike of her mother, much as I was denying my own dislike of that mother within Anne. I did not comment on the destructiveness of this mothering; it was too early in the treatment. Instead, I observed, inquired, and reflected about what was considered “good” or “bad” within this family. What I heard in my words was gentle exploration; what she heard was an implication that I thought that Anne was crazy. Between one “harmless” word and another, she would fall into a hole of inexplicable panic. I did not think that I thought she was crazy. And I was bewildered by these episodes of sudden disintegration. Now, I understand that these states were multiply determined. I am certain that she sensed my dislike and that she internalized it as a vague defect, which could neither be defined or corrected. Further, I suspect that my ready indulgence of her requests implied special arrangements for the sick, whereas maintenance of the frame would have recognized her strength. But ultimately, my hidden countertransference conspired with my overt inquiry into familial goodness and badness. We were both sensing what we did not know: that to arrive at intimacy with the father, we would both need to relinquish maternal idealization. But relinquishing maternal illusion prior to finding the father was threatening my patient with objectlessness. And that objectlessness was opening up in a field of soft parameters where she was not adequately recognized or contained. Then, too, our moral code was being challenged. We had to keep that code intact. We were at the precipice of the unthinkable, and we had no other constructs. To sustain our maternal Hero, we kept instantiating an either–or body. If I was the Good Breast, then she must be a bad

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infant. If she was a good infant, then I must be a Bad Breast. Of course, I didn’t understand this at the time. I was bewildered by our ruptures. She described states of dread, which she had never previously experienced. I sensed implicit complaint. I inquired into her feelings toward me, into the possibility of her criticisms. I knew that being a Good Breast meant inquiring into the negative transference. She had no anger. She excused all and forgave all and claimed me as her beloved. But she was urgent in the need for my reassurance: She needed me to tell her that I did not mean that she was crazy. She would analyze nothing: not her anxiety, not her acute reactivity to me, and not her need for reassurance. She could not look inward at the past or outward toward our interpersonal transaction. She was open to disintegration and closed to making meaning. My words threatened assault, and my words promised soothing. Each interchange was scrutinized for the word which had unnerved her. And then she would plead for its elimination. She insisted that I was okay and she was okay: What she wanted was the ritualistic arrangement of language. The difficulty was the word itself, not the mind which conceived it, the mouth which had spoken it, or the ear through which the word was comprehended. Gradually, I relinquished half of my words, and the half which remained were suspect. I reassured her, at first, without guile or deception. But she was not sated by occasional reassurance. I was scrutinized and probed and measured. I tried to empty my face, my body, my voice. I was vigilant about my speech and prohibited from silence, for in my silence she imagined that I judged her. Tearful, injured, agitated, she said that she knew what I was really thinking. In the arrangement of my limbs, in the cadence of my speech: There it was, the suggestion that she was mad. My mental space was so filled with her urgency that I lost the smallest margin of reflective silence. We were not permitted to think about what was transpiring. There was talk everywhere but none of it had meaning, because reflectivity seemed equivalent to the induction of psychosis. At the time, I never thought that she might be reacting to a treatment fraught with double binds. And I thought I was very discreet about my characterization of her mother. But Anne and I were living a secret relation which ruptured the illusion of maternal love. Our treatment was an incipient cultural cataclysm; it was destabilizing the foundational myth of Mother. I did not like, or really know, my patient. Perhaps this truth did register on my body, my face, my voice. But even in the early moment of my dislike, I had never thought that she was “crazy.” I had wanted her as a high-functioning “analytic” patient. I had thought that she was sane. And



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I had come to believe that she was paranoid. In that shift was a truth that seemed more urgently in need of hiding. Fractured by my judgments prior to their existence, now she was fractured by suspicions of judgments that were actually there. She never seemed to want the truth about our transactions. And I never insisted upon that truth. I had come to believe that she was fragile. And she was abject in her hunger for a lie. She told me she loved me when I felt she really hated me. She said she knew I thought she was crazy. And that she needed me to tell her she was sane. She knew I did not want her. And she needed me to tell her that she was wanted. She anticipated my abandonment of her before I had conceived it. If she was the picture of abjection, she was also bitter, accusatory, a master in the art of guilt induction. When she came, she had had no ego alien symptoms except a constriction of intimacy and desire. Now, under my care, she was depressed, anxious, insomniac, eating disordered. She binged and starved and weighed herself with precision. She proffered gifts and vomited into my office toilet. The gifts were an appeasement, and her symptoms were an accusation. On several occasions, she hurled a “present” at me as she was leaving the session. A necklace, a pin, a purse, it was always something “feminine” which was obviously discrepant with my style of dress. It was as if I was being instructed to become less of a “hippie” and more of a sophisticate. Unwrapped, thrown in my direction, sometimes even hitting me, these items would land crumpled on the floor. This action was accompanied by statements like, “I got this for you. I know you won’t like it, and you won’t want it anymore than you want me, but here.” I felt assaulted by the violence and abased by having to retrieve them. And I felt pressured to cherish them, to be effusive in my gratitude. If I had double binded her, so she was double binding me. Now I know she was commenting on the shared oppression of our feminine–maternal lie. Obviously, there was something very wrong with our maternal Hero. Anne was showing me the bitterness with which her mother constructed Anne’s femininity. At the time, I only knew that there was covert hostility masquerading as generosity. I could neither reject Anne’s gifts nor accept them: Either strategy embroiled us in toxic enactments. When I would comply with her need for reassurance, she accused me of lying to appease her. If I was silent or inquiring or interpretive, I would become prey to a peculiar body vengeance. I would emerge from my office to the rank odor of her unflushed excretions: her vomit, urine, excrement. As I had to retrieve the “gift” she had thrown at me after she had left, so I had to flush her effluvia to relieve my office suite of her stench. I knew this

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was a commentary on our real relationship. But she refused all analysis of that relation. She was offended by my “scrutiny”; I was “too Freudian,” overinterpretive, nonsupportive. I was failing to empathize about her new symptoms (nausea, constipation, diarrhea, nascent bulimia). In this treatment, her body was mutating. It was calling on me for a new construction, which would break us out of the Good Breast–Bad Breast formulation. I knew her body was in crisis. But I could only think of that crisis in terms of what I already knew. She wanted me to register the escalation of her symptoms, to suggest practical intervention for the symptom in itself. But she could not find meaning in these communications. Perhaps this was because I had only one meaning system available. The more she disintegrated, the more compelled I was by the maternal Hero: I could only try harder to be a “Good Breast.” I thought that this was what it meant to have analytic courage. Meanwhile, her excreta was the covert “bad stuff” we were continuously passing back and forth between us. Bad babies or bad mothers: Neither of us could exit from this mode of thought. Our every interaction was fraught with unspoken criticism. But she could not give voice to the mildest complaint. Insistent that I was the only therapist who knew about good relations with a man, she was certain she could not “make it if I left her.” If I questioned the exclusivity of my therapeutic value (in light of her decompensation), I met with urgency and bewilderment. By this time, I wanted her to die quietly, elsewhere, anonymous and unlinked to me as her analyst. And I did not even want to know that she had died. I wanted vacated hours, her quiet disappearance, the transferal of her need. And I felt shame about having such cruel desires. This cycle of hate and guilt was simplistic in its flagellation. It eclipsed all nuanced self and other recognition. It eclipsed creative inquiry. Either I blamed her, and she was bad, or I blamed myself, and I was bad. And so, when she told me I was helping her, I refused to believe it. I knew she was a liar and that her gratitude was simulated. All I saw was my failure as a maternal container. Manifestly, she was deteriorating. But there was a latent process in which Anne’s sexual self was gestating. For this, she appreciated me, and for this, she did actually need me. Sometimes I could almost receive this communication. But then she said that her deterioration during treatment was making her beloved mother “worried sick.” She refused all interpretations that it was she who was angry because she thought I was making her “sick.” In retrospect, I think she refused this interpretation because it was inaccurate. “Making her mother sick” was a tentative reformulation. In which her mother was neither bad, nor good, but someone “sickened” by sexist



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roles and objectification. In retrospect, I see her mother as someone who probably wanted romance and an independent career. She may have even wanted children. But romance had confined her to domesticity and dependence. She could only fix her ambitions on her daughter and hate the man who was the “cause” of her disappointment. At the time, I thought this treatment was making Anne sick. And I knew it was making me sick. I suggested that she consult with another female therapist, who might know how to arrest her deterioration. To me, this meant there was a Good Breast somewhere, even though it wasn’t me. For her, this simply meant that she was not wanted; it was abandonment made real and certain. By this time, it was a desire to abandon her. For Anne, there was no possibility of separation. I was amniotic fluid imbued with subtle poison: She was dying, but there was no other living body with which to be attached. But she also sensed that her body was being electrified by our toxins. She would not consult. She would only cling to the analytic body through which she imagined she would be fed. Instead of consultation, she asked for those extra contacts which I had promised her. Each request was accompanied by an effusion of gratitude. Phone calls, extra sessions, longer sessions: Each was spoiled for her by a single word or gesture on my part. She was fed by nothing. And then, she needed another feeding. I withered in this cycle of demand and compliance. And yet, I seemed to be unable to cease my compliance. In the Heroic chronicle of the Good Breast, courage meant masochistic self-sacrifice, a lack of boundaries or assertiveness. Phone calls, extra sessions, longer sessions: These gratifications were as compulsory as they were false. They were an antidote for my guilt, and they were spoiled by her failure to be fed. Together, we choked on hatred and on our denial of that hatred. I felt accused and guilty. I had a failure of courage. I lied to my patient. It was not a white lie or an incidental fiction. It was an essential deception. Continuously pressed for reassurance, I lied to Anne about my feelings. At first, I lied through evasions, interpretations, platitudes, and halftruths. But eventually, I actually told her I liked her when in fact I had come to hate her. I told her I wanted to work with her, when I wanted her to terminate. I told her she was merely neurotic when I had come to believe she was “Borderline.” I felt compelled to lie, and I felt shamed by my lying. My false courage had led to this lapse of ethical integrity. I sought several supervisions. I told them the truth about my lies and countertransference. But I had chosen female supervisors who were, themselves, captives of the “Good Breast.” I sensed their anxiety as soon as I began speaking.

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I must have recalled to them clinical moments which they had struggled to forget. Ugly feelings, failed treatments, ethical compromises, gender contradictions, impossible destabilizing knots. Their own shame and guilt and fear of exposure. I wanted a supervisor who could enter and unravel the grip of this treatment. I needed a mentor who understood the impotence of interpretation, the press of countertransference, and the meaning of that countertransference. What I sought was a space of empathic ethical accountability. My lying was linked to the guilty furtiveness which pervaded the treatment. Guilt for disliking her, guilt for feeling withholding—now guilt about hate, about lying about my hatred. This state carried truths that needed to be known; it needed to be transformed into creativity. Insofar as I was innocent, my guilt needed to be assuaged. And insofar as I was culpable, I needed a pathway into what Lifton (1996) calls the “animating function of guilt”: that contemplative remorse which restores the “I” and the “Thou.” To achieve this, I needed a dialogue with a transfigured female body. But my supervisors were positioned as maternal Heroes: There was no ugliness imprinted on their clinical memory. From the distance of technical and moral impeccability, they reiterated what I already knew about “proper” technique and analytic frame. They told me what I knew I should have already done. They referred me back to my analyst, to whom I was already speaking. Supervision consolidated my dysfunctional cycle: Being seen had assured me that I was even more of a “Bad Breast” than I had thought. Anne became more hateful because she was the occasion for my badness. What if she told people about the terrible job I was doing? I abandoned supervision, or perhaps I should say, it abandoned me. Of course my supervisors told me not to lie. And, of course, I continued lying. But somehow, after my supervisions ended, my patient found an aperture for healing. For Anne, hate was proximal to desire. Like desire, hate is a body force. It transfigures the psyche–soma, and it is not deceived by pleasantries of speech. If we lied, still, we went on with our hatred. If we went on with our hatred, truth was awakening within her body. Suddenly men noticed her; she could laugh with a man and find warmth within him. I was mystified by this improvement. I had imagined men in flight from her needy, hostile abjection. I had pitied the man who would have the misfortune to become involved with her. I anticipated him as I now knew myself: captive, depleted, false, longing for freedom, never becoming free. I thought our analytic knot would be some measure of her heterosexual transactions. Strangely, they were not.



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During respites from our altercations, she would tell me about her dates, attributing all improvement to our work. Even in my guilt, I could perceive that therapy had had some effect. Nothing can convey my surprise. When it came to sex, Anne and I had a few easy conversations. We talked about her fears. Now, there were remembered moments of tenderness with her father. Where bodily repugnance had always been, there were memories of his warm flannel shirts, the embrace of his arms, crisp country air infused with the smell of burning leaves. There were earthy men whom she found sexually attractive. Slowly she located her arousal. She began to masturbate to orgasm. She had mildly pleasurable sex with a man whom she liked. She did not have an orgasm with him, but she didn’t plague him for reassurance. She believed in his affection. Of course, it occurs to me now: Perhaps she believed him because he really liked her. This never seemed like a possibility to me, then. At that time in our analytic dyad, it was as if a good Oedipal mother was mysteriously grafted onto a malignant pre-Oedipal object. Previously, there had been a malignant mother: bitter, guilt inducing, close binding, demanding of exclusive obeisance and adulation. With her mother, there was no nurturance except that which was an illusion; there was no exchange except in the solicitation of lies. All memory of maternal bounty was tantamount to delusion. Like the deposits left in my toilet, maternal offerings were “narcissistic excreta functioning as nectar” (Eigen, l986, p. 69). To want from her mother’s body was an assurance of unsated craving; to want from her father’s body was an assurance of maternal retribution. But there was an ordinary good father, and with him, there was a child who could be sated. In this family, mother regulated love’s distribution. By cultural fiat, nurturance possessed breasts. And so the milk of the father’s kindness was made to flow from the maternal body, while bitterness adhered to the paternal body. In coming to treatment, Anne had produced a fissure in this embodiment of love. In wanting a man, she had begun to imagine that a father could be good. In relocating hate with the woman analyst, kindness reverted to the father. Unbeknown to us, love’s body was being transfigured. But this transfiguration tormented our identities; we could not allow it to enlighten us. And so, none of this ever found utterance between us. Shortly after her first sexual experiences, Anne became convinced that there were no good single men in New York City. She wanted marriage, and the boyfriend she had liked was not a long-term possibility. He was a nice guy, but after all, she had to marry “up.” She decided to move away to a city where there were “more marriageable men.” I knew that this made no rational sense.

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After all, she had moved to New York City because it was sophisticated, and it was moneyed. We had resolved little between us about what had really happened, but somehow there was an abatement of dependence. Geographic relocation signified the need to leave her mother for a man, to keep the man away from the mother, while still imagining mother as the first locus of nurturance. She moved away. Two years later, I received a card indicating that she was married and that she was pregnant. I was certainly relieved by this “transference cure.” Still, I experienced her termination as nothing but freedom. For even in our more productive moments, Anne and I had no real attachment but a condition of bondage. We were linked in the incapacity for thought. As Fonagy and Target (1998) describe it, we needed one another “not as part of a mutually beneficial and satisfactory relation, but because our dissatisfaction with one another kept a greater fear away, the terrifying mental void left by an absence of thoughts and reflectiveness” (p. 57). This mental void was overdetermined. But it was caused, in part, by our addiction to Heroic convention. Without our maternal Hero, we thought we had no objects. To sustain our maternal illusion, we demonized each other, and then we fabricated love through lies. This produced an idealization of an inaccessible good object and a diabolical persecution by an ever-present bad object (Green, l986). We could neither deconstruct our hate nor separate from the object of our hatred, because this would have entailed acts of cultural resistance, inquiry, and subversion. Instead of engaging in this resistance, we helped her to marry “up.” There is no doubt that she was less lonely and more capable of sensuality. Unlike her mother, she also had a career. But was she really fulfilled in love? Would she become embittered like her mother? What would she be like when it was time for her to mother? The Return of the Hero Throughout Anne’s treatment, I longed for the “right” form of Heroic transformation. The more it eluded me, the more I chased it. The more I chased it, the more I demonized my patient. In this condition, I had no conduit to danger and freedom. I couldn’t fall through holes in my known world. I was unable to shift my posture or my position. All I could do was move between badness and nothingness, without rest, in one hell or another, infinitely exposed, caught, as Eigen (1986) says, “in that force that has already devoured the person or the realness of the person. Now it devours the unperson or unrealness of the nonperson. It devours the



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shell that is left, the counterpart of the person, the empty phony version; the dead false self” (p. l06). I was being eaten by that force that consumes everything, even itself consuming. And so I lied. Then I had the shame and guilt of my lie and an analytic secret which persisted for 20 years. We might easily say this knot couldn’t happen now. Psychoanalysis has disassembled the maternal Hero. But we have installed other Heroes, and those imagoes keep dictating new forms of Heroic transformation. A postmodern vision does not secure us from this predicament. Our teachers may praise chaos, ambiguity, bewilderment, diversity, elastic bodies, and constructed knowledge. But we can still turn these positions into authoritarian forms. I can almost hear the Heroic edicts inside my students’ heads these days. Know! Don’t know! Listen without memory or desire! Embrace confusion! Unpack that enactment! Label that dissociation! Frankly, it’s exhausting. My maternal Hero looks simple by comparison. As Slochower (2006) notes, contemporary relational analysts have a “noir idéal.” The “noir idéal” can become a rigid form of opposition which confirms its own variant of the Heroic structure. Suddenly, these terms are the new arch-Villain: knowing, authority, identity, perversion, pathology, searching for “historical” or “objective” truth. We valorize fragmentation and multiplicity and forget how much fragmentation hurts (see Layton, 2004). Enactment, dissociation, trauma: Our favorite concepts have started to eclipse every other lens on the human psyche. While we are praising complexity, we are at risk for losing our complexity. We’re so busy being noir, we won’t be able to converse with anyone who isn’t. That just might include our patient. By the time we catch ourselves “enacting” this predicament, doubt has been enlisted by the “fascist state of mind” (Bollas, 1992). When we permit this to happen, it is as if All prophecy has been to you Like the words of a sealed document. If it is handed to one who can read and he is Asked to read it, he will say, I can’t, because it Is sealed, and if the document is handed to one Who cannot read and he is asked to read it, he Will say, I can’t read. (Isaiah 29:11–17)

7 Intrepid Subjects Rescuing Lost Generations*

When an analyst has a clinical and ethical failure, that memory endures in her professional unconscious. In Anne’s treatment, we kept faith with our Heroic conventions, and we produced a persecutory structure. False courage, false compliance, true lies, true secrets, real hate, real shame and guilt: For me, this was a hall of mirrors in which my courage was lost. I don’t know what happened to Anne later. I do know what happened to me. I went on being, and I went on doing good work. But I had a disturbing clinical memory, which would never really convert into an I–Thou history (see Grand, 2003). Isolated and fixed in time, this memory kept confirming my familial legacy. I had an inadequate Heroic self, and I lived with “catastrophic loneliness” (Grand, 2000). Of course, I had many reparative clinical experiences, in which I could see my own therapeutic resilience, effectiveness, and resourcefulness. With other patients, I was nurturant and tender. I was ethical and authentic. I could engage chaos and ask myself questions. But still, I had a scar on my clinical memory. I had a secret self. In that self, cowardice seemed ascendant, and my courage seemed eviscerated. Now I know that many therapists have had such professional traumas. I know how rarely we work them through with one another. In our field, we need more frankness and better communal support (see Grand, 2003; Leighton, 2004). Our failed treatments should be worked through with peers, supervisors, and analysts. They should be discussed in seminars. In the absence of this support, these treatments become the “unthought known” (Bollas, 1995); they leave an “unformulated” (D. B. Stern, 1997) trace in our professional unconscious. They may seem forgotten. But our professional debacles linger, like *

Portions of this chapter were previously published in Grand, S. (2003). Unsexed and ungendered: The violated self. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 313-341.

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ghosts, in our office. In the long arc of an analytic career, we will have the opportunity to revisit them. Fragments of memory will be evoked by another treatment, and they will infuse the ambience of that new treatment. If we are fortunate, we have a second chance, and this time, we get it right. We keep faith with the I–Thou relationship. We allow danger to transfigure us. We resist persecutory structures, and our heroic capacity comes into view. Regeneration and Transgenerational Transmission When we fulfill this second chance, we may imagine that we have done this by ourselves, for the patient. But we never do this without help from the patient. Of course, she enters analysis with the template of her past. But she also engages the mysterious template of the analyst’s past. Inside the analyst, she senses an unknown prehistory, which emanates from another time and place. Through unconscious communication, the patient develops an inchoate sense of this prehistory. Sometimes, this becomes a “collision” (Slochower, 2006) which has deleterious effects. Once, the patient was responsible for the unknown damage inside of her parents. Now, she is managing the unknown damage inside the analyst. When this transaction becomes a collision, healing may be foreclosed. Once again, the patient is sacrificed, and the analyst is reconfirmed as a failed Hero. But in other therapeutic dyads, this meeting evokes unforeseen possibilities. It is a strange encounter, which transfigures both the analyst and patient. Identities get destabilized, but new forms of subjectivity make their appearance. This occurs through a mutuality of creative concern.* I am not recommending that our patients heal the lost selves inside the analyst. But I do think this happens, and sometimes it leads to mutual regeneration. In these processes, the analyst’s “traumatic” clinical memory becomes an analogue for the familial and cultural memories which have infused the patient’s family. The lost selves inside the analyst become an analogue for the lost generations which inhabit the parental psyche. Failed cases live on inside of us, much as our parents’ ghosts live on inside of them. When Reis (2007) writes about parental ghosts, he might be writing about the impact of the analyst’s humiliated memories: “Like traumatic memory, they are timeless; *

As Aron (1996) suggested, analysis is a system of asymmetrical mutual influence, in which two minds co-construct a dynamic field. At all times, however, the analyst has greater power, and has primary responsibility for insuring that the analyst’s needs do not impinge on the patient’s growth.



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their haunting of the living goes on for generations … they carry their mute messages and their enigmatic demands, seeking witness to hidden catastrophe” (p. 621). Once, this patient was possessed by parental ghosts (see Reis, 2007). She was visited by a “secret history” (see Faimberg, 2005) which occurred before she was born. Now, in analysis, she is being visited by a secret clinical history which occurred before this treatment was “born.” In the transference, there is a “telescoping of generations” (Faimberg, 2005), a direct engagement with transgenerational transmission. This replication is always a risky business. The dead souls of lost generations, the dead soul inside the analyst, the compromised selves inside the patient: These reignite psychic danger. The dyad will fall through holes in their known world. But in that fall, there is the potential for freedom. The analysis can repeat and cure what Abraham and Torok (1994) refer to as the patient’s “endocryptic identifications”: the “exchanging of one’s own identity for a fantasmic identification with the ‘life’—beyond the grave … lost as a result of some … traumatism” (p. 142). In this cure, there is a hope for repair. Instead of reproducing persecutory structures, analyst and patient can act on one another as intrepid subjects. They can forge an alliance in the midst of fear. This time, there is no Hero in the analytic dyad, and no one is functioning as a Villain. Instead, there is a traumatic transcript which is revealed and narrated by ordinary heroes. When ordinary heroes meet at the epicenter of dread, when that meeting is infused with mutual compassion: This is the moment when lost generations seem to come back to life. Recently, psychoanalysts have become interested in the transgenerational transmission of trauma (see Davoine & Gaudillière, 2004; Faimberg, 2005; Grand, 2000). Following upon the seminal work of Laub and Auerhahn (1993) and Laub and Podell (1995), trauma studies have elaborated the ways that “knowing and not-knowing” (Laub & Auerhahn, 1993) unfolds through expanding circles of relatedness. We have come to realize that terror layers itself onto future generations and that the present is also layered with the terrors of generations past. This is what Reis (1995) and Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) refer to as trauma’s “symptom of time.” This is an atemporality in which “madness juggles, gesticulates, and resists” (Davoine & Gaudillière, 2004, p. 11), undermining our efforts to place trauma in the past. In this dissolution of time, one form of madness keeps linking us back to others: in our parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents.* It links us to a culture, a village, a people, an entire episode in history. *

See Apprey (2003); Davoine and Gaudillier (2004); Faimberg (2005); Grand (2000); Reis (2007).

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As psychoanalysts, we have come to realize that other wounds must be investigated to make meaning of our own. This is true for the analyst as well as for the patient. It also pertains to the prehistory of the analyst’s clinical “traumas,” as they are infused with cultural memory and superimposed on subsequent treatments. But analysts seem resistant to this recognition. Metaphorically, we are like good parents who have lost children in a war zone and want to start a new family in a new world. As analysts, we want to imagine that our clinical prehistory isn’t affecting these “children,” who are born here, now. But often, it is affecting these children. In our denial, we are foreclosing knowledge, tenderness, and reflectivity. We don’t realize how we may be “acting out” on our patients. And we don’t see the ways that the patient may be constructing a “lamentation narrative” (see Sontag, 1997) for the analyst’s lost self. We don’t notice the ways that the patient “propels a regenerative cycle” (Bassin, 1994) and restores the analyst to life. Of course, patients shouldn’t be responsible for repairing the analyst’s clinical and cultural prehistory. If the patient has a family legacy of trauma, they have already struggled under this yoke. As Reis (2007) put it, they have already been possessed by their parents’ ghosts. They have always been encumbered by someone else’s memory. They shouldn’t bear this burden in their analysis. But, as Searles (1975), Hoffman (1983), and Singer (1971), suggest, patients try to heal their analysts. When patients carry the heritage of transgenerational trauma, they may actually search for the “dead” self within the analyst. By reviving that dead self, they rescue lost generations. In these moments, our patients can find themselves as intrepid subjects. They contest Thanatos and reinstate us as “like subjects” (Benjamin, 1995).* I discovered this with Rosa. Explicitly, we were working through her memories. But in retrospect, I realize we were also reckoning with my memory of Anne and my struggle with the Holocaust. Together, we confronted the abject triad of “fear, fascination and horror” (Sekoff, 1999), as it was refracted through our histories. We became entwined, bewildered, and our identities were destabilized. But Rosa kept hold of the I–Thou relationship. Together, we transfigured the body and created a new transcript for trauma. We found an inscription for perpetrators and victims, without repeating persecutory structures. We found the hero in ourselves and in each other. We recalled war and fascism and dehumanization. We located the missing. We memorialized them in their nonhuman thingness, and *

Searles and others have written about the ways that patients try to heal their analysts. I am expanding their view, and suggesting that they help us heal from earlier professional traumas.



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we restored their human particularity. We went back to another country, in another time. Then, we came to America; we were immigrants, and we laughed as we wept. Through “hallucinatory chasms” (Eigen, 1986) and “holotropes of imagination” (Tannen, 2007, p. 124), we revived lost generations. This possibility emerged the first time that she told me a dark story and, in telling it, made me laugh. Rosa: Female Forms, History’s Lament When Rosa came to me, I felt I already knew her. Our memories were drawn from the same landscape. Postwar Brooklyn, the row houses of Brownsville. Stickball in the streets. Delicatessen floors covered with sawdust, barrels full with pickles that were floating in their own brine. Grocers selling homemade pasta. The smells of mandlebrot, hot bread, sweet cannoli. Prices were always negotiable for a well-told story. And in Brooklyn, there were stories. In Russian and Polish and Yiddish. In Italian and broken English. The streets were rich with gossip, with the exchange of food and solace and unwanted advice. Couples courted and quarreled and scolded their children. Children ran free in a new world. Everything was loud and public and impassioned. Voices quieted by nightfall, erupting again as dawn struck the street. Inside the row houses, there was a dimmer universe. There were yellowed pictures, silver candlesticks salvaged from the old country. Old things, sacred objects, heavy with grief. There were wall-to-wall carpets, furniture sealed in clear plastic, pristine rooms that could not be entered. To be impoverished and to labor, to acquire a home, and at last to buy furniture. To seal that furniture in plastic for all perpetuity: This was discipline and hope and fatigue and sadness. It was a mimicry of America and a reverence for America, a longing for assimilation and a dread of dislocation. Outside on the street, children were simply children. But within these interiors, the full weight of history was fixed upon their backs. Expansive bodies shrank in upon themselves. Children moved with caution and sobriety through dark hallways, through the narrow confines of parental memory. At every opportunity, they fled to the streets. In spring, in summer, in fall. Then winter came, and ice would descend upon Brooklyn. Exuberance would be pressed into dim quarters. When I met Rosa, I knew she was from Brooklyn. I recognized her in the way she told a story: straight-shooting, quick-witted, dark-humored, and

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absurd. She would have us roaring with laughter while pain sat upon our chests. She seized life in dark places. Insistent about the truth, she would look at whatever needed to be seen. She could look backward at the past and forward at the future. And she was always resolute in her intentions. She knew where she had come from, and she knew where she was going. She could change the endings of her stories before she had even finished telling them. She had that kind of discipline and mobility and courage. She suffered. But she always did the right thing. From the first, she looked me in the eye, and she registered me as human. There would always be something simple and warm and authentic between us, a basic human decency and a basic human trust. It would take her years to offer that kindness to herself. She hated her body. She was depressed. She was always alone. She was not really lonely, but coveted her isolation. There was a dread of invasion, an exhaustion at the prospect of any intimate contact. She lived the changing seasons of Brownsville. Professional life was the summer street: At work, she was sharp and real and really herself. Bold and independent, confident, risk-taking. She was hard-driving and hard-working, ethical, and generous in her business encounters. There were “work friends.” But evenings and weekends found her in a wintry row house. There was deadness and panic and an episodic blankness which transpired without memory. A desire to drink and a struggle to avoid drinking. And a body she never looked at or allowed to be seen. She despised her orifices, her curves, and the places she thought she was lacking in curves. To Rosa, her body was nothing but a conglomerate of deformities: small breasts, sagging belly, fat hips, legs, arms. Attractive, she moved with grace, but she could not feel herself moving. For me, there was an appealing quickness to her physicality; I thought her shape made interesting shifts between the angular and the round. I was arrested by the immediacy of her eyes. Face, body, mind: I responded to her as an evocative whole. But to Rosa, her body was in pieces; it was loosely linked fragments united by blunt hatred. She ate compulsively and she vomited; she gained and lost weight. And she joked about aspiring to anorexia. In the years of her alcoholic youth, there were sexual encounters. Stone drunk, she still insisted on dim lighting, heavy blankets, the concealment of clothes. There was little pleasure. But there were beatings by a drunken man who made use of her. She left him. She stopped drinking, alone, without any help or intervention. She was never beaten again. Now she lives a life in which there is no female body. Insofar as she is female, she is inspired with self-hatred. Insofar as there is no self-hatred, there is no body. Below her neck is a neutered edifice, moving parts in service to mental function.



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Feet transact pavement; hands operate telephones, keyboards. There is nothing much in between. She has lived most of her life in an unconflicted celibacy. She always knew she was female. But in disembodied states, her body did not have genitals or any gender marker. Indeed, her body was often entirely without existence or sensation. Twice she had almost died because she could not experience an encroaching illness. Still, she was exceptionally clear and cogent and related in our sessions. She knew that her childhood history was undoing her. Rosa was unsure whether she had been adopted as an infant. There were indications that she was adopted, and lies about that adoption, and no information about biological parents. She didn’t know if her roots were in Italy or in Russia, or even whether “her people” were really Jewish or Catholic. She grew up with her older brother, her younger sister, her mother, her father. She did not look like them. In this house, there was real warmth with her Russian–Jewish father and strict propriety from her Italian mother. There was a brother disabled by some cognitive defect, who depleted what there was of maternal attention. There was a little sister who required Rosa’s nurturant attention. If Rosa was unsure of her own origins, the mother’s origins were obscured by dislocations, separations, abandonments. There were relatives missing in Turin who were subsequently restored. There were relatives missing who were never restored. There were years when the mother was missing from her own family. In the mother’s own childhood, there was a “home” she was taken from and a “home” she was returned to, without knowing that she had ever been missing from home. There was an adoptive family she was left with and removed from. There was a biological family where relations were ill-defined. There were brothers who were not real brothers and real sisters who were unknown to each other until their own adulthood. There were no grandparents left alive, but there was a great-uncle who seems to have been her mother’s actual father. All of this was dimly connected to the disappearance of Rosa’s “real” mother, her maternal grandmother, and the great-uncle’s wife. With regard to these figures, there were false explanations and no explanations and stories that cracked under the slightest scrutiny. And there was a seamless disregard for all contradiction: They were long dead, and they were not dead. Grandmother was in an Italian sanatorium, she was in an American psychiatric institution, she was mad, she had never been mad, she had died many years ago, she had only recently died. The great-aunt was dead of a brain tumor, she had died in childbirth, she never got out of Italy, she died while emigrating to America, she had been arrested by Brownshirts. No one seemed to know who or where these women were, or when or where

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they had last been seen, or precisely where they had been lost. With regard to Rosa’s “real” mother, there was no disappearance. Rosa’s mother was her real mother. But somehow, Rosa never believed it. In this family, there are lost attachments and no attachments, and there are people who do not know where they come from or to whom they belong. Some relatives are Russian, and some relatives are Italian. Some aunts cook with garlic, and some aunts cook with schmalz. There are Catholics who turn out to be converted Jews. There were no religious rituals, and there were peculiar religious rituals, and there were Catholics discovered crying in synagogue. Rosa identifies herself as Italian and as a Brooklyn Jew. She speaks some Yiddish and some Italian and has an affinity for Easter and Christmas. Although the father’s family was more cohesive and intact, still, there were numerous gaps and lost relatives. Throughout all of this familial confusion, there is never any talk about what mobilized such ambiguity and dislocation: There are no Cossacks or Nazis or Fascist assassins. The only relative left from the grandparent generation was the mother’s “widowed” great-uncle. There are a few family stories about him from the old country: He seemed garrulous, elegant, irreligious, irreverent. Then, in America, he was absent of his wife and mute about her absence. Family gatherings found him silent. He could not or would not tell his story. He did not sit with the other immigrants. He would not raise his own voice in their communal joy and lament. He refused speech and grief and all possibility of comfort. In his silence, succeeding generations were denied the privilege of remembering. Stiff-moving, remote, he passed his days in the living room. That sacred space of old photos and new furniture. He alone was permitted access to the radio and, later, the television. Sometimes, Rosa would slip in. She was curious: the forbidden furniture, the stories on the radio, the allure of the moving image. He would not speak, meet her gaze, or shift his body; he never seemed to know that she was there. There was no evidence of life on his face. The radio, the television, the newspaper, the drone of sound, the shifting image, the black and white “snow” on the screen after programming had ceased: These were his hypnotic. Silently, she watched him listen and she watched him watching. She would slip out again, unseen. In this silence, there was a universe of untold stories. This man was the locus of familial sadness and confusion. He was pitied for a solitude which could never find its name. And so, his acts of sexual predation fell outside the family register. Rosa and her sister, all of their cousins: These children knew this man as their molester. But they obeyed the prescription about the secrecy of grief. They spoke of these violations only to one another. To the adults, they spoke of nothing. Each



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child had a story of being molested as she “slept.” Each one had pretended to be sleeping. As adults, they discovered that none of them could sleep. Rosa knew that incest informed the hatred of her body. Our treatment explored family mysteries and stories and violations and lies. We wondered who belonged to whom, who was missing and who was there, and she tried (and often failed) to locate family history. We continued the investigation Rosa had begun in childhood. At age 10, she discovered concealed documents. The “dead” grandmother was alive in an American psychiatric institution. She had been there for more than 20 years. In this family, there was a “dead” person who was both mad and left alive. There was an alive person who was “dead” and disappeared. Exposed documents had no impact on the family story. There was an insistence that the grandmother was long dead, until the day when this grandmother actually died. Rosa was 18. There was a recognition of familial loss and a denial of familial loss. Somehow, the grandmother’s recent real death was conflated with her old, fictitious death. Truth was absorbed into falsehood. Rosa’s mother did not want any real maternal story. Fiction was her constant, soothing object; it occupied the space where disintegration might have been. Despite familial collusion and resistance, Rosa kept looking and she kept asking. During her treatment, Rosa discovered the conversion of Jews into Catholics, her mother’s early adoption by a foster family, her subsequent return to a biological family which was mysteriously absent of a mother. In the context of this family, we explored the incestuous experience. I wondered why none of the children had exposed him. She said that they had pitied him for his grief and loneliness. They knew he needed something he could not have with a wife. He had aroused Rosa and he had soiled her, and she had sheltered him through her compliance. If she pitied him, so she pitied her mother. This man was her mother’s only parental object. Rosa sensed that the revelation of incest would orphan a woman who had already been an abandoned child. And if Rosa was adopted, who would the mother choose? And in telling, would she expose the mother’s own memory of being molested by the man who was molesting the mother’s children? Rosa’s mother was decent and responsible and competent in the provision of basic care. But there was something strict and dour about her, an absence of tenderness, intimacy, play, and understanding. She was peculiarly withholding and dictatorial about food consumption, inducing a sense of subtle starvation. This coldness may have led Rosa to believe that she was adopted. Perhaps the image of a missing mother was a fantasy of another, more intimate attachment. A mirror for the mother’s missing

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mother. We would never know. But certainly, there was little strength in the mother for Rosa to rely on. The mother saw my patient’s independence and decided that Rosa did not need. She saw her son’s inadequacy and dependence and decided that he needed. She saw Rosa mothering the younger sister and deferred that sister to Rosa’s care. When she did mother Rosa, she was cloying and anxious, controlling and intrusive, full of predictions of doom. Rosa learned not to need, and she learned not to ask. To the mother, it was Rosa who had repudiated all mothering. Injured, rejected, bewildered, she gave less, but she did not cease her intrusive commentary. Ultimately, my patient knew that there was no mother there to tell. With Rosa’s father, there was a steadiness of warmth and affection. He seemed solid as a rock and just as enduring. There was shared laughter between them and an easy support for her competence and independence. But he was overworked and overtired, rarely home. One did not burden him with family matters, although undoubtedly, he would have intervened about the incest. And so, for Rosa, home meant the great-uncle, the mother, the gentle but weak older brother, the dependent younger sister. It meant invasion and compliance and isolation, the deferment of her own need, and the derailment of her own feelings. Self-isolation was her first and only effort at self-regulation. She feared that, like her mother, I would retaliate for her isolating maneuvers. But it was so clear that we were attached. The simplicity of our bonding seemed transacted through the father. And through the shared memory of those Brooklyn streets. I was at ease with her movement in and out of connection. And so, she rarely moved out of connection. We developed a relation rooted in an understanding of her need for solitude. We knew it as a healing retreat, the first of many movements toward self-regulation. With this reframing, she embarked on the project of experiencing her own needs and feelings. And I never left her. In experiencing self-regulation in the transference, it became possible for her to read her own sensations and affects. At last, she became linked to the somatic. Suddenly, there were bodily complaints about pain and illness and hunger and overfullness. She exercised, had massages, sought out doctors and dentists. She lost weight naturally as she engaged in conscious, healthy eating. She began to speak about feelings that were rooted in sensation, about sensations that were rooted in feelings. Where there was deadness, now, in her solitude, she alternated between quiescence and pain. She spoke of some desire for intimate human contact and a dread of relinquishing her solitude. She even imagined a renewal of sexuality. Still, she felt too ugly to allow herself to be seen. In her feminine body self, hatred had softened into dislike and into a more realistic appraisal. But



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there was a persistent dual body experience: a maligned feminine self and an unsexed, disembodied self. Two years passed. Suddenly, she was offered a high-level executive position in the fashion industry, which required her to travel throughout Europe. She realized that travel would interfere with her treatment, rupturing our attachment, evoking some of the depression and anxiety that comes with displacement and homelessness. And of course, the fashion industry would exacerbate the devaluation of her female body. But she was very excited about traveling, about the enhancement of her career. She felt ready to terminate “for now,” knowing that more work would be needed if she wanted to pursue intimacy. In the weeks before her termination, she remembered childhood adventures disrupted by mother’s anxiety. She needed to share her sadness without the diminishment of excitement. She had always been bold and risk-taking. We enjoyed that excited self. And we knew that we would miss one another. It was a sad but fulfilled parting, in which her transatlantic journey seemed to mirror other transatlantic journeys, from another time. Moving into the fashion industry, her female self seemed to register a familial lamentation: The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment … Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over … Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty, She has folded Them back in her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. “Edge” (Plath, 1981 p. 93)

Thingness and Thanatos: Eros Surpasses Lamentation A year passes. I receive a call. She is in trouble, depressed, professionally mute, and frozen. She arranges telephone sessions while she is traveling throughout Europe. She calls me, and in these phone calls, we enter a strange new phase of treatment. I cannot see her embodied. Her missing

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image begins to play on me with a kind of hallucinogenic action. Her voice seems cast in strange textures. I cannot see Rosa. But I can see the telephone cable traversing frigid waters, emergent in strange cities, buried under continents, ruthless in its progress. I feel my voice emerging from my own mouth. It is like a substance poured into plastic, poured from plastic into wire, from wire into that cable which is a conduit for her fear. I wonder if she can hear me speaking. I ask if she is feeling unreal. She says yes. I ask if she can see her body. She says no. Her mind is located somewhere outside of her head. She has no head. I tell her that she seems to be imploding, not with depression, but with fear. She says that she did not know it was fear. And then she says that she has known anxiety, even panic, but this is something beyond those states. It is something crackling, unraveled, avoidant of light and sound. The warm sun of Cannes has become a terrible illumination. Objects are growing in size and in dimension. Desk tops, table tops, the cushions of chairs: The inert becomes mobile and the mobile, inert. Voices are obscured in a tinnitus of sound. There has been an alteration in the lens of her sight, a tactile shift in her relation to the ground. Her universe is electrified by the uncanny significance of things. There has been no access to words, no proximity to the symbolic. She is mute in all the places where she has always been able to speak. And she cannot speak to me in our familiar language. There is a visual acuity to my listening which I have rarely experienced. I see her landscape, and yet, I cannot see her. My words seem to grasp the shape of persecutory scenes. Shared remoteness begins to dissolve into the mirroring of fear. Still, we are mystified by the quality of her dread. She tells me what she can. For a year, she has been an executive purveyor of the young and the beautiful. Her world is peopled by idealized constructions: men, women, tall, sculpted, thin, impeccable in every feature. I anticipate the self-hatred aroused in her by their perfection. But where there has always been self-hatred, now hatred is absent, because there is no body to hate. And then she tells me this. As her work cycles through the fashion capitals, she reencounters figures who look as if they are themselves, and yet, they are not themselves. Alien, yet recognizable, their brown eyes have become green, become blue, become brown again. Brown hair becomes red, becomes blonde. Plastic surgery erases all evidence of human frailty. What might have become real is “beautified” and obscured. Bodies are disassembled, parts reconstructed, cut, burned, inflated. Skin is peeled and shrunk and stretched, as if human skin was malleable stuff. Faces “lift” into masks. Silicone is implanted in muscle, supplanting real muscle and flesh.



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Souls evaporate as fat is suctioned out. Lives are lived by false copies of the real, so that there is an appearance of humanity without being human.* I think about the continuous rupture in object constancy, about the absence of any attachment. The reawakened mystery of who is where and who is missing. These are familiar conditions for her pain, but they are not the terror itself. The terror seems to reside in these peculiar bodies. As I listen, my mind seems crowded with hallucinatory scenes. I see fashion models seated in identical repose. Rosa’s hand unscrewing plastic heads. Revealing mechanical works where human brains should have been. Row upon row of plastic heads filled with plastic works. Torsos severed, bloodless and immaculate. Wires, screws, computer chips, plugs emerging from white necks. Heads screwed back on and a simulation of movement. Everything but the eyes. The eyes are fixed, slow-moving glass. The eyes of dolls, the eyes of the dead. I am staring at the telephone receiver in my hand. I am riveted by the surface of hard plastic, by its alien internal mechanisms. I need to unscrew the casing of the receiver and expose that interior. To find the cable which is the conduit for our voices. Perhaps this is not Rosa’s living voice, but some technological improvement on the human voice. A simulation of thought and a simulation of sound. Or her voice has been prerecorded prior to her disappearance. This voice is really the voice of a prior transmission. I have been speaking to someone who was never present. I need to see her. I cannot locate her. She is the cable, buried under continents, buried under the sea. She is inside of my receiver. Trying to get out. Embalmed in plastic and wire and cable and transmitters, no longer trying to get out. I reawaken to a considerable silence. She has stopped speaking, when, I cannot remember. Finally I speak, and she tells me that she was afraid that I was dead. In this moment, she finds the residual “dead” self inside the analyst. But she also awakened affect and imagination inside a “dead soul.” In the treatment of Anne, I had lost my own courage. Now, Rosa and I were transfigured by fear. We met the unforeseen, and together, we took the leap. Once, I was constrained by the Heroic conventions of psychoanalysis. Suddenly, those constraints seemed to disappear. I tell her about the unscrewed heads, the bloodless torsos, and the mechanical works. I say that humanity seems to have been replaced by the robotic. Humans are *

The analysis of this case is predicated on distinguishing traumatized “human” selves from the traumatized “it” or “thing-self.” My definition of “human” evolves for the reader, but is linked throughout to various forms of embodied relatedness, which include, but are not restricted to, sex and gender. In contrast, the traumatized “thing-self ” is linked to varieties of disembodiment, unrelatedness and de-animation.

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eradicated, and the natural world has no living matter. The landscape of Cannes is an artificial rendering. Light is the residue of nuclear radiation. The earth is populated by the mutant and the dead. When she calls me, she is calling out to some remembered universe of the human, in which there is a possibility of a living human bond. She calls in the possibility that she can be alive. She says yes. There is a flood of talk about the nuclear landscape, about the humanoids which surround her. It is not as if they were robotic, they are robots. And she was the only one who knew it, until I saw their unscrewed heads. Of course, she “knows” that they are not robots. She is no more paranoid or psychotic than I am myself. She is sane and strong and rooted in reality. But there is an alternate universe which is really populated by the mutant, the dead and the robotic. We see them and we know them. In that clarity, we feel exceptionally sane and exceptionally mad. Some truth is emergent in this sharing of delusion. Knowledge seems to require a breakdown into symbolic equation. There is an elasticity to our minds which anchors us in “reality,” and yet, it allows us to play with a contained madness. She has opened this gateway to knowledge and will not retreat from it. Once again, she is fierce in her desire for the truth. At last, I deeply recognize her, and I almost see her as I saw her last, sitting on my couch. Human, alive, embodied. She is Rosa, who always rewrites her destiny. Even in this measured disintegration, there is something ironic. She tells her story, and she caricatures her story, so that the story’s ending is rewritten while she is still enduring it. She doesn’t lose her dark humor. She’s inside terror, but she also keeps her perspective. I have rarely known someone to risk this path. I comment on her courage. She sighs. She doesn’t think it is courage. But I know her to possess a remarkable curiosity and fortitude. Within a week of speaking about the robots, there is a coherence of her terror and an abatement of that terror. Over the next two weeks, she jokes about the “humanoids” and rapidly recovers her capacity for speech in professional meetings. Still, she covets human contact and cannot locate anyone who is human or alive. The world retains its peculiar cast. Fearful of light and of “robotic” encounter, she stays in her hotel room at every opportunity. Now I realize that her great-uncle was the original humanoid. Incest did not just happen as she slept. There was another story. Every Sunday, the uncle would leave the house and not return until many hours later. Rosa discovered that he was going to the movies. She longed to see a movie, to make contact with this man who did not see her. She was about 8 years old, and even then, she was resourceful. She got the money for the ticket, and she followed him. She pleaded with him, and she pestered him, and he moved



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forward in his silence. At the ticket window, they buy their tickets. He seems to accept her presence. They take their seats, and the movie starts. Together, they fix their eyes upon the screen. She is excited. He is blank. Not a word has been spoken to her. He is oblivious to her presence. He masturbates her in the dark. He is without arousal or aggression or sadism. He makes no plea for the “tender” relief of his hunger. There are no threats, no coercion of lies. There is not any kind of human regard. He never turns his head to look at her. He does not laugh at the cartoons or respond to the film. There is only sound, flickering image, fingers moving in her vagina. Infinite hours, as the film begins and ends and begins again, a continuous cycle, at which he stares unblinking. He does not register that the film is over. His fingers move, they stop moving, they move again. For Rosa, the first moments of excitement and arousal—the stimulation of the film, the stimulation of her genitals—become deadness and imprisonment and dread. She is lost and does not know her own way home. She is too frightened to leave without him. She is hungry. She needs to urinate. She needs this thing to stop in her vagina. She tries to tell him. She tries to shake him. He is unmoving and unresponsive. She becomes mute and unmoving. At last, the last show ends; an usher makes him leave the theater. She follows her uncle home. She goes to bed, mortified in her body and stripped of all embodiment. We have spoken of this incident before. But not in so much detail. And we have never explored the impact of his deadness, until she addressed it in me. Now, we realize that she was molested by a corpse. He was a rapist who didn’t even seem to know that he was raping her; he didn’t know she was there even while she was being raped. Her first passions—degradation, anxiety, anger, arousal—were inspired by a severed hand. There was no whole, living human rapist imbued with the quality of malevolence. There wasn’t even a whole, dead human rapist, possessed of essential bodily coherence. There was a dismembered body part autonomous in its movements. Fingers still moving after rigor mortis had consumed the rest of the corpse. Or perhaps they were not his own fingers, but those of other, remembered hands. Moving with violence and hunger and abject supplication. The twitching of his hand inside her: Did this mean that someone is still alive and that she must save him? Could her arousal be the stuff that could animate the dead? Or would rigor mortis simply trap stiffening fingers inside of her? The cold cave of her vagina. A vagina filled with bloody body parts. A vagina filled with bloodless things. As we speak of these images, we have reached the core of her disintegration. There are pieces of dismembered corpses deposited inside of her. And there is nothingness deposited inside of her, and there is no inside of her vagina in which to deposit that

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nothingness. There is a vagina which is a repository for corpses. There is a warm human vagina which is the repository for human grief. And there is a thing–vagina, a crypt constructed of mortar and stone. An evacuated no-self vagina, a blankness where a vagina should have been. An absence mirroring a series of absent female bodies: mother, grandmother, greataunt. Through this act of incest, bodies have been registered as whole corpses and fragmented corpses, as thinglike and nonhuman, as empty caskets and whole cemeteries, as the body parts of unwanted memory. Rosa’s vagina was nonexistent and overcrowded. It was the repository for lost generations. It memorialized history’s perversities. Insofar as she was raped by a dead thing, bodies were not bodies, and they had no sex and no gender. Genitals were absent because incest was transacted between nonhuman things. This nonhuman transaction mirrored other, inhuman transactions: forgotten women who had been treated like things. In the analysis of these fantasies, in the excavation of memory, she mentions that the fashion “humanoids” are without sensuality or eroticism. Beautiful, they do not possess or evoke desire. I ask if they have genitals, and she realizes that it is as if they do not. Big breasts, broad chests, nothing between their legs. It is true that she defensively subtracts people’s genitals, for in the absence of genitals, genitals can neither violate nor be violated. This is how we had initially understood her unsexed and ungendered self, in the first phase of her treatment. As a defense against rape, against the degradation of her own incestuous arousal. This was an understanding cast in terms of human malignance and human mortification. It was a half truth which did not reach into her disembodied self. For Rosa, there would be no half truths. She must have sensed that bodies lacked genitalia because they were not human. Somewhere, there were perpetrators who were inhuman, who had treated her relatives as if they were nonhuman. But this was a memory which could not be spoken in our human encounter. It had to be conveyed through transfiguration. And so, she took a job devoid of real human bodies. She contrived a telephone treatment in which there was a missing human image. The absent image, the absent body: These opened into traumas in which the human were not human. After we worked with the scene in the movie theater, our conversations lost their edge of primitive disorder. When she calls, we are simply speaking. The telephone retreats into an invisibility. Strong and no longer fearful, she transacts the “humanoids” with her old humor and vitality. She inspires respect at work for her dedication and creativity. She refuses the ruthlessness which pervades her profession. She facilitates and supports subordinates and finds some friends who are related and authentic.



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She speaks of transferring to a position where she can settle in either London or Paris. Through the “thing” testimony, familial history has been released. She doesn’t want to wander, homeless, across the globe. Still, we are not going to reunite. Time and distance will continue to register grief and loss. Like the narrative of the female body, this story, too, is a lament. But this story also contrives a triumph over death. At this moment, she has an extraordinary dream. She finds herself looking at her naked body in a mirror, knowing she has never looked at it before. It is attractive, slender, voluptuous. She has the larger breasts she has always desired, the long limbs, the slender waist. And she discovers that she has a penis as well as a vagina. The penis is erect, and she masturbates it, not with arousal but with a delighted astonishment. She feels beautiful and sufficient unto herself. We speak of her having an inviolate body, a new body, unmolested, emergent from within her own mind. This is not a body conferred on her by rape. And it is not conferred on her by any form of erotic affirmation. It is an imaginary body, an undoing of time. She sees that she has everyone with her and inside of her. Both vaginas and penises: men, women, girls, and boys. Everyone from the old country. Not immobilized or broken. They are robust, young, tumescent. Adventurous, aroused. Glowing, resilient, laughing at fascists, active in the resistance, outwitting war. They are rescuing friends and relatives, bringing them to a new world. They are bringing them to Brownsville and to the summer streets. Once again, Rosa is in postwar Brooklyn. There is sun and light and air. There are no missing relatives, no stories which cannot be told. Front stoops are rowdy with immigrant speech. Open fire hydrants spray water on hot, loose-bodied children. The great-uncle joins in the clamor of humanity. He is joined by the grandmother and the great-aunt. Finally, there are women with names and faces, who weep and laugh about history. There are stories about jackboots, escapes from Brownshirts, penniless journeys, arrivals at Ellis Island, told and told again. In Italian and in Yiddish and in broken English. In open doorways. While the smell of cooking wafts out. Rosa has the body of an unmolested child. Moving outside to the streets, inside to the row house, she is alive amid others who are embodied and alive. In this imaginary body and sustained by an imaginary family, Rosa meets a man outside of her work and has an affair. He is warm and kind and passionate. At last, she is sexually alive, naked, and unashamed. About six months later, Rosa terminated her therapy. But we knew that nothing could separate us: not time or distance, not cruelty or “cowardice,” not any kind of transatlantic journey.

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Lost Generations and the Intrepid Subject Rosa’s thing–vagina was a lament. It was a grave for missing relatives and missing memories. But strangely enough, it also revived the relatives who were missing. The thing–self was a crypt. But it had a certain irony: It restored a vagina to a woman who did not have one. It had the emptiness of loss. But it was also overcrowded.* It became a boat to America; an open door, spilling life onto rowdy streets. Through this motif, Rosa created signs for terror and for terror’s state of “catastrophic loneliness” (see Grand, 2000). She memorialized evil, but she also ceased its reproduction. She stopped passing destruction from one generation to next (see Grand, 2000). Rosa could imagine unimaginable registers of danger. She recognized mass destruction, and she celebrated heroic intervention. She never forgot human subjectivity. Our analytic space was fraught with primordial anxieties. But laughter kept cascading through this darkness. Our destiny was rewritten, because her quest was navigated by a trickster for whom “humor is the energy, movement is the process, and embodiment … refuses to be a victim” (Tannen, 2007, p. 10, italics added). In this refusal to be a victim, she deployed irony as a “device aimed at revolution” (p. 8). Rosa’s wit was revolutionary. It had intentionality. It kept restoring us to life and asserting the dignity of the abject (see Chapter 9). To achieve this, she found an epic form for missing memories. Once, destruction had turned vitality into ashes. But with a trickster’s animistic magic, Rosa turned ash back into life. Her great-uncle joined in the clamor of humanity. He was joined by the grandmother and the greataunt. Together, they told their stories. Awakening these lost souls, Rosa also awakened the dead soul of my own heroic self. Once, I had been like Rosa’s uncle: wounded and wounding, I had been mute about Anne. Now, I joined in the clamor of humanity. Anne reawakened inside of me, and I began to tell our story. I became able to think, reflectively, about what had happened in Anne’s treatment. I stopped living in secrecy and shame. I began to write about my clinical failures. I began to hear about other clinicians’ failures. They stopped living in secrecy and shame. My lie became something which could teach and from which I could learn. It was Rosa who made this possible. Whenever I remember her, it seems as if The deaf shall hear even written Words, And the eyes of the blind shall see Even in darkness and obscurity. (Isaiah 29:11–17) *

Faimberg (2005) describes this as well.

Section IV Resisting Demonic Heroes When our vision of courage is dominated by the Heroic Other, I–Thou relatedness is compromised. This occurs in traditional warfare, in childhood imagination, in intimate relationships, in psychoanalysis, and on the cultural stage. In our quest for Heroic transformation, we often perpetuate conflict. We engage in some form of destructiveness: toward ourselves and toward the other. This problem reaches its peak in certain forms of global violence. In terrorism, counterterrorism, genocide, and state terror, the Hero claims a malevolent ideology. Villain and Hero become fused in a perversion of Courage. Innocents are persecuted by a Demonic Hero. In the final chapters of this book, I examine terrorism, genocide, and state terror. I inquire into underlying dynamisms of these practices. In examining these dynamisms, I want to illuminate Heroic perversity. How does global violence enlist Heroic mythology? Why does cruelty become linked to Heroic transformation? Against the backdrop of these questions, another heroic comes into focus. This is the ordinary hero, who resists Demonic practices, without reproducing a persecutory structure. How do ordinary citizens answer totalitarian regimes? How does this citizen dignify the abject? How do the abject dignify themselves? In the following chapters, I keep returning to these questions, as I move through clinical and cultural perspectives.

8 Restoring Reverence to Sacrificial Bodies Terrorism, Counterterrorism, Torture*

In suicide bombing, destruction has been perfected. It travels light, and it travels anywhere. It is cheap. Small acts can bewilder large nations. Terrorism requires few leaders but has infinite converts. It spreads like a virus and operates in diffuse cells. Secular reason cannot persuade it. Warfare only increases its fervor. The material realm has little to offer it. Improved political and material conditions might reduce its mass appeal. But once suicide bombers have undergone conversion, they seem beyond the reach of corporeal existence. Their mission feels exalted; their sacrifice, transcendent; they have an imaginary fusion with the divine (see Stein, 2002). We may understand some of the political–cultural conditions which motivate this conversion. Still, we think this mission is madness. Love is confabulated with hatred, and random lives are left at the altar of God. In this practice, “the death fear … is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice of the other” (Rank, 1936, p. 130). For generations, humanity has sought such supremacy † through traditional warfare. But this supremacy was always the province of generals and kings. The tragedy of combat was inscribed on the soldier’s material body (see Grand, 2007). With the advent of religious terrorism, tragedy is erased from the body of the foot soldier. Ecstatic possibilities seem accessible to everyman. In militant Islamic fundamentalism, new converts can always find “infidels”; they can construct and detonate bombs. Thus the terror-warrior becomes more than a foot soldier, as Stein (2002) suggests. He subordinates himself to God, and then he imagines a fusion with that God. Awakening in the afterlife, he will become his own king. Sacrificing * †

This chapter was previously published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18, 671-689. Reprinted with permission. This sense of transcendence can be linked to religious or secular ideology.

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innocent lives and sacrificing his own material body, he gains the sense of “mystical election” (see Girard, 1972) which Nietzsche (1885/1963) ascribed to the Übermensch (Super-Man): I no longer feel in common with you; the very cloud which I see beneath me, the blackness and heaviness at which I laugh—that is your thunder-cloud. Ye look aloft when ye long for exaltation; and I look downward because I am exalted. (p. 40)

The Demonizing Structures of Terror and Counterterror Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (Yeats, 1921/1956, p. 184)

To formulate effective answers to terrorism, we must concede its brilliance. As a strategy of war, it is extraordinary. As a mode of Heroic transformation, it seems perverse. But it is also radical and alluring. To us, the suicide bomber is the archetype of what I would describe as the “Demonic Hero.” To attain the status of absolute goodness, the Demonic Hero must find a personification of evil and then vanquish that personification. The Demonic Hero claims purity and power in violent contest with an identifiable Villain. This Villain is portrayed as a formidable and evil opponent, whose death confers strength on the Hero. But in these demonizing structures, this “formidable villain” is actually an innocent and helpless victim. The Demonic Hero must cloak his violence in mystery, awe, and revelation, so that the actual innocence of this Villain is never discovered. This is the foundational structure of terrorism and human sacrifice. To achieve his own Heroic transformation, the terrorist requires the bombed body of the civilian–infidel. To acquire his “talisman of supremacy” (Girard, 1972, p. 12), evil is projected onto innocence, and violence is practiced as a form of ritual purification. An outgroup must be dehumanized and used as the repository for badness. To claim his own ecstatic goodness, that badness must be subjugated, extruded, exterminated. When this type of “sacrificial ritual” is ascendant in a culture, there is a continual search for the “Evil Other” and a continual effort to purge that Evil Other without any evidence that this Other is evil (see



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Frankfurter, 2006). There is no presumption of innocence, there is no discourse of reason, and there is no Hero without a sacrificial Villain. In these contexts, reason is replaced by exhortation, fear, awe, and exaltation. In my view, this is the structure of Heroic demonology, and it is the underpinning of fundamentalist terrorism.* To outwit terrorism, we must answer and resist its Heroic demonology. Tragically, during the Bush years, American counterterrorism was a shadow of its opponent: We, too, were in a fever of unreason. Throughout our counterterrorism practices, there was no presumption of innocence, there was no discourse of reason, and there was no Hero without a sacrificial Villain. We searched for the Evil Other, we imprisoned and tortured that Evil Other, without demonstrable evidence that this particular Other was a terrorist. Our Heroic mythology relied on human sacrifice: the dead in Iraq, the prisoners in extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention. Meanwhile, real threats were uncontained. We, too, have had our rituals of mystery and revelation. Creating a system of torture, disappearance, and indefinite detention, we eviscerated our democracy. Looked at from this perspective, the counterterrorism machine has been a refracted demonology. Detention centers utilized torture; they were kept secret, and they have been void of due process, evidence, and the rule of law (see Davis, 2008; Smith, 2007). In our detention centers, prisoners have been held in an incontestable category of guilt. Interrogated because they must be guilty, they are guilty because they have been interrogated. In all of these features, there is an unfortunate echo of the Salem witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition (see Frankfurter, 2006), the Dirty Wars in South America (see Graziano, 1992), Block 11 in Auschwitz (Broad, 1951), and the S-21 prison in Cambodia (Nath, 1998). They evoke the taped, coerced confessions extracted by the “exorcist-prophets” of the terrorist groups themselves, prior to the beheading of journalists, soldiers, and civilians. These counterterrorist practices refract the deep structure of religious terrorism (J. Stern, 2003). Our detention policies have confirmed the very structure of terror, because “terrorism, then, aims to produce signs that cannot be read, but can only be followed. Such signs demand submission rather than interpretation” (Moss, 2003, pp. 325–327). During the Bush administration, the word suspect dropped out of our public lexicon, and with it, any possibility of innocence. As citizens, we *

It is also the underpinning of state terrorism, slavery, genocide, and other forms of mass violence.

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were meant to defer our own knowledge to those who operate the mechanisms of counterterror. In this discourse, we seemed like unpatriotic “infidels” if we wanted transparency and evidence. When submission and faith displace reflectivity and evidence, democratic resistance is undone, and we become a mimesis of jihad. When the photographs of Abu Ghraib were first exposed, they signaled the need for transparency. Citizen protest aroused a human rights inquiry: How did this happen? This inquiry was quickly replaced by a darker one: Does torture work? On whom can it be practiced? Thus, as Lichtenstein (2003) puts it, The word “terror” (or its variants “terrorism,” “terrorist”) taken as self-evident and absolute truth, provides a portal for the sense of monstrosity to enter the debate. The implication is that once in the realm of terror all restraint is lifted. Any response to the monstrous is acceptable. (p. 315)

When torture has been normalized, it silences democratic inquiry (see Hollander, 2008), and it spreads the terrorism it is designed to contest. As Girard (1972) pointed out, violence is mimetic. It is “like a raging fire that feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames” (p. 31). In the aftermath of 9/11, we felt fragile, humiliated, vengeful, and helpless (Moss, 2003). We refused to admit that we were mortal and insecure (Ensler, 2006). We turned into a manic society (Altman, 2005; Peltz, 2005). We imprisoned a “detachable villain” to suppress our sense of “tragic impossibility” (Wheeler, 1985, p. 205). Then we denied the existence of our own demonology, while we fused with the demonology of terrorism. Now, with the Obama administration, we have another chance. Will we repudiate our Heroic demonology, or will we continue it? Listening to Sacrificial Bodies Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (Nietzsche, 1886/1966, p. 102)

As Altman (2005) and Peltz (2005) would suggest, splitting and demonization are not the only way to resist terrorism. To refute terrorism’s structure, we must restore our reverence for the material body. We must insist on the humanity of BOTH sacrificial bodies: the bombed body and the innocent body in indefinite detention. We must bring these bodies into a



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condition of simultaneous and mutual recognition.* When we do this, we are insisting on an alternative vision of counterterrorism. Creative, effective strategies will begin to come into view. These strategies will attempt to answer terrorism without replicating its practice of human sacrifice. As citizens, many of us have been participating in this alternate vision throughout the Bush years. We will persist in our concerns, as we wait to see what Obama does about detention and the rule of law. The Obama administration espouses human rights principles, due process, and the closing of Guantánamo. Obama has released the “torture memos” written by the Bush administration. Our current president favors transparency and repudiates torture, but he is quietly maintaining some problematic policies (see Glaberson, 2009; Savage, 2009; Schwartz, 2009). As citizens, we must continue our vigilance. In the public domain and in the privacy of the consulting room, we must continue to expose and resist the prevailing discourse of terrorism and counterterrorism. We must maintain our reverence for BOTH sacrificial bodies: the bombed body of terrorism and the tortured body in detention. Throughout the Bush years, this reverence was expressed within the government, the military, the FBI, the CIA; inside of detention centers; and by lawyers, journalists, human rights groups, and concerned citizens. In psychology, a determined group of activists protested psychologists’ role in abusive interrogations.† We are especially indebted to Neil Altman, Ghislaine Boulanger, and Steven Reisner. Converging in the public domain, these voices exposed the problematic nature of counterterrorist practices without occluding the barbarism of terrorism. In this alternate discourse, terrorism’s Heroic demonology was illuminated, but it was not reenacted. We kept faith with democratic precepts. We cherished human life, and we refused to perform as terrorism’s evil Other. We created a new narrative for terror, in which reverence was entwined with resistance. This took place in the public domain. But it also infused clinical process, when motifs of terrorism and counterterrorism entered our office. As analysts, we cannot close the door on global conflict. The violent passions of supremacy and sacrifice; the lost reverence for human bodies; the imprisonment, disappearance, torture, and extinction of the evil Other: These themes may be threaded through an individual psychoanalysis. Offered up to the analyst as personal trouble, these themes repeat, expose, * †

For a discussion of cruelty, submission, and mutual recognition, see Benjamin (1988). We are particularly indebted to Altman, Boulanger, Layton, Peltz, Soldz, and Wolff-Bernstein. See Altman (2008); Boulanger (2008); Hollander (2008); Peltz, Wolff-Bernstein, and Grand (2008); Soldz (2008).

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and resist our shared political trouble. In this type of analysis, intimate experience is inscribed with, and illuminated by, global knots. When analysts can hear and decode all of these layers, our empathic capacity expands. The patient’s complaint becomes more complicated. But it also becomes more visceral and accessible to the analyst. The analytic dyad is always a citizen dyad. At the moment, the whole world seems to be on fire. Entering the consulting room, the participants exist in a shared field. Our unconscious processes are being colonized by the same violence. Our minds and bodies are being seduced and damaged by the same demonizing structures. When human sacrifice is the hallmark of violent ideologies, the sacrificial body tends to exist in a state of “catastrophic dissociation” (Boulanger, 2007). These bodies are inscribed on what Layton (2005, 2006) calls our “social unconscious.” Until we restore them to human reverence, they will continue to seek recognition by making us “sick.” They will write themselves into our psyche–somas and into our interpersonal fields (see also Apprey, 2003; Davoine & Gaudillière, 2004; Grand, 2000). They will disturb our passions and our desires. They will bewilder our agency and increase our anxiety and our guilt. As Layton (2006) suggests, personal conflict cannot be unlinked from its social context. Layton’s perspective permits us a new realization. For personal healing to exist, clinical change must be linked to cultural change. If we are open to this shared experience, we have the capacity to recognize our patient in new ways. In this context, there is a heightened potential for personal healing. This personal healing contributes to our project of cultural healing. Global Conflict Enters Psychoanalysis I discovered this in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, when I was treating Alan. A few months before he came for treatment, the photographs of Abu Ghraib were published. Every morning, on the way to my office, I bought The New York Times. Throughout the morning, I left it on the floor next to my chair. Its headlines were both obscured and exposed. Unmetabolized news and unmetabolized communications met those patients who arrived each day before my lunch hour. At lunch I ate and cussed and finished my reading. And then in the afternoon, the newspaper vanished: I threw it away, but it was not out of me. I had swallowed it along with my food. And so, over time, my esophagus began to burn. Moving through my days, concentrating on my work, I began to have a



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recurrent vision. My esophagus appeared to me as an inflamed orifice. I found myself thinking that something deadly was happening in there. I imagined my esophagus stretched, swollen open. Sometimes it seemed like a ring of fire, dead center in my body. Or it was my “whole” body, and there was nothing else. Then it would appear to float in the air, dispersed, uprooted, “blown apart” from the “me” that the rest of “me” was in. I lost weight and found it difficult to eat. The newspaper, my weight loss: I didn’t think about what this was communicating to my patients. But in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, I had “entered a new territory which reveals the abject nature of our current corporeality” (Orbach, 2006, p. 109). All of this remained subliminal to my awareness, until Alan returned to treatment. I have treated him once before. He is a homosexual artist, politically progressive, committed to a life lived in compassion. Our work has always focused on his pursuit of love and intimacy and passion. His previous relationship was a shared depression; there was warmth and home and the fundamentals of kindness. But there was no desire. Alan always thought that he “had no libido.” Sex was effortful, self-conscious, contrived. Our first treatment encounter had parallels to his partnership. Alan and I were hard-working and earnest and insightful and productive. We were kind and we liked each other, and we readily processed grief. But the ecstatic juice of his viscera never appeared. We had, of course, talked occasionally of politics. His apartment, my office: We are on the same block in downtown New York City. We read the same newspaper, at the same time. Like me, he lives in the memory and the anticipation of terrorist attack. He is appalled both by jihad and by our country’s answer to jihad. But we have never had a conversation about detention and torture. He returned to treatment when my esophagus hurt. He has broken with his old boyfriend, mourned, tried multiple partners and sexual experimentation. Impersonal sex was hot, and it was hollow, and he still didn’t know what it was that he wanted. But now, Alan is wildly in love and in lust and desire. With a new man who is creative, proactive, alive. Alan is enlivened in ways he thought were impossible, but he is obsessed by new layers of shame and guilt. Outside of bed, these men exist in a mutual, tender, egalitarian relationship. In bed, the lover likes to be sexually submissive; he has invited Alan to play at aggression, possession, domination. To engage in sex acts that simulate degradation. The lover likes to surrender himself as “girl” to Alan as the “man.” My patient is excited, and his lover is excited. But the license to dominate insinuates a dangerous edge where mutual pleasuring could evoke Alan’s sadism.

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When Alan is with his lover, everything seems “all right.” But when he is away from his lover, sexual memory converts into unwanted images of his beloved. Face down, prone, unmoving, anus red and swollen from a limitless series of anonymous “penetrations.” And then horror converts into something else: a consuming jealousy that this intimacy has been given, casually, in the past, to someone else. Then jealousy becomes shame and shame becomes horror; the tape runs again and he cannot stop seeing, or exit from, his obsession. And then they have sex and he is captivated by pleasure. They are tender, and he is captivated by love. Telling me, he laughs and says he wants psychosurgery; be careful what you wish for, he says, you might get it! If menace is implicated in Alan’s desire for his lover, we, too, come together in bodies which are burning. Me, in my hunger for food; he, in his hunger to enter and dominate his beloved. For both of us, lust signifies wounded orifices and fugitive pleasures. We have eyes and ears locked open to too much knowledge. Anuses and mouths distended by the lust of repeated invasion. For both of us, appetite is the somatic opening for violence. Once open, these somatic places are locked open, never permitted to close, to say “yes” or say “no,” and never permitted to recover. We are suffering a tandem preoccupation, a cinematic tape of body parts in abjection. We exist, both of us, on a dual track. Witnessing a dual vista. Ordinary life, here, now. While we hear an echo of interminable submission. Dark moans which seem to be transferred from another time and place. For me, these are the sights and sounds of history’s cycle of interrogation and detention. For him, they are the sensorium of sexual exploitation. Practiced on the tender opening to his lover’s heart. Our bodies seem to witness atrocity and to feel implicated in that atrocity. If we desire and if we satisfy our desires, somehow this brutality will have been wrought in our name. Neither of us, alone, has anything with which to metabolize this problem. What we have, together, is an uncanny resemblance in our sensory visitations. We are formulating a kind of fraternal twinship. My heterosexuality, his homosexuality, my vagina, his penis, the mirrored series of somatic ghosts: We are alike and yet different, suffering in intimate reference to each other. Unbeknown to ourselves, we are becoming the sacrificial bodies of terrorism. Neither of us can close our eyes on the body in pain. He is aware of his toxic emotions, but until I point it out, he is not aware that his is a visual-body obsession. He realizes that he thought that everybody’s eyes ran on these two tracks: the ordinary, here, now, and the other, the dark, cinematic, looped tape. I am thinking yes, and I am thinking no. There is at least one other person whose vista runs on two tracks.



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But I also know that this is a figment of trauma. I query his assumption that this is the very essence of vision. This inserts a new perspective, a point of entry into the way in which he suffers. There is a sudden jolt of synchronous, electric memory. Speaking in one voice, we both say, all at once: “Do you remember A Clockwork Orange?”* and then: “the way his eyes were pinned open.” Yes, yes, of course, we recall that scene which each of us must have read 30 years ago. A torturer, tortured: He was bound to a chair, eyes pinned open, forced to watch, overstimulated, prohibited from sleep. So begins the implicit resonance of our bodies, the refraction of sadomasochism and guilt and desire. Our gaze is locked open, fixed on body rings of fire. In fascination and hunger and horror. Our association describes our own experience and is also a referent to other, wounded bodies. To 30 years of intervening history. In which bodies have been pinned open, pinned down, entered by malignant forms of domination. They incite our imagination because they have been concealed from our gaze, because we have never seen them. I do not tell Alan about my tandem vision or my tandem torment, but I am encouraged to use my resonance to enrich the work. There are times we seem to be in direct, preverbal communication. My esophageal “hole” burns in my chest, floats in the space between us, intermixing with a burning anal ring. Our body parts are blasted out, severed, lost as in a suicide bombing; they are penetrated by cattle prods; they entwine like lovers. In this intimate refraction of each other’s somas, we evolve a new fluency about sex and bodies and genders and violence. The clunky gap between my heterosexuality and his homosexuality softens up. He risks telling me graphic sexual details; I risk asking. There are times when I am too shy to ask about details which I think I should already know about as a sophisticated analyst. There are times when he is too shy to tell me about specific practices. There is pain and embarrassment and exposure and vulnerability for both of us. And a lot of laughter about what a female “vanilla” heterosexual analyst doesn’t know about gay sex. What’s this, what’s that, I keep saying, to our great amusement. I sense that this is a moment when he could be contemptuous, play out some sadistic game on my naїve display. For him, these are frightening moments when I could judge, inspect, pathologize, and humiliate. When I am ignorant, he never is withholding or contemptuous, but relieved, enthusiastic; there is a willingness to explain, to bring me in, to let me know, even though he is afraid I will think he is perverse. I do not feel he is perverse; he *

Burgess (1962).

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feels “seen” without feeling shamed or “inspected.” I am curious and more therapeutically empowered. Our conversations about sex are becoming more like the actual sex he is having with his lover. We are mutually exploring questions of dominance and submission, but that question is engraved on the deep trust of mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988). In the meeting between our bodies, we are revealing and resisting the structure of global violence. We risk domination and cruelty, and we refuse cruelty in favor of empathic enlightenment. In this interaction, we are two subjects, alike and yet different. There is an excited switching off of “who is that girl, who is that boy” (Layton, 2004). There is an identification in our bodies, orifices which keep replicating and differentiating, translating into somatic fusion, differentiation, and exchange. Hunger intensifies and hurts. Our eyes burn with an excess of sight. Gradually he takes me into what he calls his “porno torture chamber”: that place where familial history met the photos of Abu Ghraib. What I discover, first, is that for Alan, there is a rapid oscillation between male and female, which corresponds to the “do-er” and the “done-to” roles which Benjamin (1988) described. And then, the flux in gender identity undoes that split. Alan has always felt “masculine” and yet he says he is a “woman” about love. He wants fidelity, home, and romance. But now, apparently, he also wants hot sex. To Alan, when a man lusts, he becomes a heterosexual “dick” in search of a fungible hole to “fuck”: “He” is faithless, a betrayer, a perpetrator of women. In phallically penetrating another man who plays at being a submissive, inviting, prone girl, Alan is afraid he will become the perpetrating “dick” that he uses. If my esophageal hole sweats the pain of others’ interrogations, his lover’s anal hole seems to sweat the shame of women’s sexual degradation. For both of us, the perpetrator always seems to be a “man.” Even when that “man” is a woman interrogator sexually humiliating male Muslim prisoners. Even when the vision before us is Lynndie England,* smug and muscular, with a crawling man–dog prisoner on a leash. Even when a suicide bomber could have been wearing a veil. In the field between us, the lover–prisoner always appears as a “woman” even though he is often a “man.” Neither Alan nor I know how to escape the identificatory, phallic evil of the agentic position. All we can do, apparently, is complicate desire with passive self-torment. So that inside each of us, there is a done-to and a do-er, hooked onto a penis in relation to the anus-mouth-vagina. *

A former United States Army reservist serving in the 372nd Military Police Company. She was convicted in 2005 by the Army court-martial for inflicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.



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Then Alan tells me this. Once, when he was young, Alan was asked to give an erotic spanking to another man. He lost control and did not hear the man asking him to stop. He became afraid of his own sadism and has avoided the erotic pull of domination. This admission collides with a memory of my own. I recall my initial coldness toward the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, a post–9/11 desire for them to be interrogated by phallic, military women. My fantasy of vengeance toward Osama bin Laden: I wanted to see him coerced into a sex change operation. I wanted him to live out his days as the humiliated vaginal property of Islamic fundamentalist men. For Alan, as for me, there was a slippage into cruelty. Ancient history, now, but unmetabolized. This sadistic wish has been resurrected in the theater of our bodies, in the cinematic loops running before our eyes. In memory of the spanking, he resists all hunger for sexual domination. But what appears, instead, is a tormented craving for possession. Eyes pinned open in his “porno torture chamber,” he envisions his lover anally penetrated by another. These images evoke the humiliation of jealous impotence. Then, in search of reassurance about fidelity, his grilling of the lover begins. He “extracts” information about the lover’s sexual past. Reassurance fails, past sex acts fuel his jealousy, and the partner seems both wanton and suspect. The lover seems like someone who is too “hot” to be constrained by love. Intimacy is then riddled with further interrogation, and the porno torture chamber fills with horrific detail. To be played upon his eyes for days at a time. So that the dread of agentic sadism keeps converting into passive masochism. In our prior work, Alan has always tried to work his way out of his jealous preoccupations. He wants to protect his relationships from this type of cross-examination. In his past treatment, we could not really break through this enactment. But in the past, we had never lived in matched cells. I did not understand his reversible, somatic play of dominance and submission. I had not experienced the fascination with cruelty and the dread and shame which attends this fascination. I had not yet lived through 9/11, through my own fantasy of female interrogators humiliating militant Islamic men, of bin Laden, sexually dominated by militant Islamic men. My country had not yet picked up, and made real, my private fantasy of vengeance. Now my hunger seemed complicit in such cruelties. I needed to imagine such cruelties and to have a protective parental shield create boundaries around that imagination. So that, like Alan, the wish to spank would not go too far. But things have gone too far, and my body is inflected with those bodies in detention. While I am both there and here, inside psychoanalysis and outside of it, Alan is telling me about bondage,

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blindfolds, masks. About the erotic simulation of humiliation and coercion. About practices which control vision and blindness. As his therapist, I am not worried about Alan enacting real sadism. And I want him to enjoy his passion without shame or guilt. I do not think that his sexual acts are perverse or in need of change. But I sense that he cannot exit from the porno torture chamber unless we both recognize cruelty. I say nothing about detention, or torture, or the photos of Abu Ghraib. But suddenly, I hear my own descriptors shift. I talk about his possessive, jealous self as the interrogator, conducting surveillance, holding lovers in “confinement,” seeking but never finding “actionable intelligence.” I talk about the reversibility of torture, as he is pinned into the porno torture chamber by the very body he has dominated. Alan hears my language, and now there is something visceral, deeper, more fluid happening in his treatment. So that finally, the anal site of his desire appears to us as a site of trespass, a signature, not of jealousy, really, but of violence and horror. And because he has phallic desires toward this site of trespass, he is the enemy combatant, the would-be perpetrator, who must be contained in indefinite confinement. Stripped of the right of habeas corpus. I suggest that there is some scene engraved upon his memory. Something old, made more acute now by our geopolitical landscape. I ask about the impact of the news we are both exposed to each day. The news which lies silently, each session, next to my feet. Now, at last, I can ask about the impact of terrorism and torture, about the fascination of cruelty, about his dread that such cruelty might be his. All of this comes together for us. And I say that the wounded orifice fixed upon his vision is ambiguous in its shape. And he says, suddenly, that all of the women in his family were raped. At the very end of a session. I have known him well, over several years. He was the only boy of a severely depressed mother; he had four older, depressed sisters. In this family, there was a rough kind of loyalty and bonding through which Alan tumbled, bewildered and neglected. The children had several fathers, but there was never a father living in the house. One of his sisters had committed suicide. As a boy, he felt his mother was suicidal. From birth, he was overexposed to all their sexual development and bodily functions. There was a kind of vaginal befoulment which followed him through the house. There was an utter failure of discretion, self-care, or any type of cleanliness or boundary. Dirt was hormonal sweat, a female slovenliness of every type and dimension. These were women for whom womanhood was never a celebration. Womanhood was resignation and bitterness; it was dependency



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on, and abandonment by, men. He was always looking at prone female bodies, legs spread, undressed, drunk, depressed, asleep, passed out. Women’s sexuality seemed infused with alcohol and cigarettes and an aftermath of despair. Everywhere he looked, there were dirty tampons, soiled sanitary pads, worn stockings, bloody underwear, “woman” troubles, hysterectomies, filthy bathwater. As an infant, he had opened his eyes into these signs of female abjection. In this family, men almost seemed like an imaginary construct, mere phantoms suggested by all this bodily evidence. Whatever a man was, he somehow signified longing and rescue and betrayal. So I ask him to clarify what he means when he says that they were all raped. He can tell me only of one incident. He was 7 or 8 years old. It was nighttime, he was in bed. He heard a man chasing his sister, a scream, furniture crashing, weeping, nothing said in the morning. Another image of a sister, sent away, returned months later, the sense of a baby missing. These memories seem to crystallize what is causing all this female depression. Phantom dicks were stuck up women’s holes, ripping bodies and souls to pieces. These dicks produced bloody underwear, lost babies, tumors, the surgical removal and reconstruction of damaged parts. Men are the cause of drunkenness, the cause of suicide. In all of this, here was a little boy in possession of a penis, that instrument of torture which should never be inserted into a hole. In this family, he is not allowed to become a girl. He has to be the boy who will compensate for all of these male abandonments. He has to want to “make love” to girls, not “screw” them. In this family, his heterosexuality is mandated, and then he has to become celibate. His heterosexuality is required to affirm female desirability, and then he must stop seeking sexual liaisons. He must be the family’s White Knight, restoring virginal innocence, undoing befoulment and exploitation. He is not supposed to want or seek to love the father–men who have left him; he is supposed to punish and repudiate them. But he is not heterosexual. He can have sex with girls. But really, he is a boy who wants to have sex with boys. He is a boy who wanted a father. And so the deus ex machina unfolds: Sex and separation happen all at once. He flees these women in his late teens. He has the enduring guilt and shame about that abandonment. He thinks his disengagement caused his sister’s suicide. He certainly wanted to rip his way out of the suppurating wound of depression. But he also wanted to shelter the vaginas, keep them from male trespass. Through the theater of the porno torture chamber, he becomes the mother and sisters, toward himself and with his male lov-

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ers, attempting to imprison the only “him” whom his family could both accuse and lay claim to. We talk about this over many sessions. He continually returns to the mystery: What caused all of their pain? Why couldn’t they go on, live, recover? There was always something missing, he said, about what had happened before he arrived. He refers, again, to the fact that his mother was considered the “slut” in her family—repudiated, poor, promiscuous. She was kicked out of her own family and then left by a series of men. All because she was indiscriminate in “her” lusts. I say that he was born into wounded orifices, into a world of fugitive pleasures. Then he says, “She just couldn’t keep it in her pants.” So that, for a moment, mother is, and has, the “dick” which exploits her own “hole.” This then was what he meant when he says that all of the women in his family were raped. In the fantasy life of a small boy, family life was a perpetual loop of rape. The mother’s hermaphrodism was autistic, intriguing, and monstrous. It seemed like a cascade of sexual violence and traumatization. I decide to say, again, that these terrible times have potentiated the troubled reckoning with his lust. There was the arrival of a new boyfriend, relaxed in his instruction of my patient’s desire. But there were also the photos of Abu Ghraib, articles about Guantánamo Bay, an insurgency in Iraq, beheadings, our national discourse about torture. I ask him now how the photos of Abu Ghraib have affected him. He talks about the dangerous heat of global phallic fervor, of vengeance and domination unleashed. So that his dread increased about his own repressed “brutality.” Every time the news records a death in the War on Terror, that body converts for him into something vaginal: It is tortured and dismembered by phallic weaponry. As in his family, the penetrating penis always appears as the first cause of all this unrelenting grief: in Iraqi civilians, in victims of terror, in prisoners of indefinite detention. In his sisters and mother. As his own penis was empowered in the exploration of his lover, daily news would reignite his conflation with a perpetrator. In this analytic dyad, the body locates the intersection between childhood trauma and culture trauma. For both of us, the sacrificial bodies of terrorism aroused an identificatory horror and an identificatory fascination with cruelty (see Moss, 2003). For Alan, sexuality was the arena in which he expressed that horror. In erotic life, there is a registry for unseen political practices which are “immoral, sinister, scheming and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter” (Kristeva, 1930, p 232). And so Alan used his erotic narrative: as a testimony to female abjection; as a testament to the abject body in



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detention; and as a restoration of reverence. Together, we recognized that body orifices hold multilayered histories: now, ongoing in our culture; back then, in his family and in his culture. Together, we restored those histories to human recognition. Finally, Alan finds himself, alone in bed with his lover. They are two men meeting each other, both willing, both wanting, both of them “rugged and tender” (Guss, 2007). They are loving, egalitarian, and compassionate. Alan is no longer afraid that desire will unleash his sadism. His agency does not sacrifice innocent bodies. It doesn’t turn grown men into wounded vaginas. Anal sex doesn’t turn his lover into an abject “girl.” Snapshots of infidelity do not visit Alan. He is no longer seeking “actionable intelligence.” The imprisoned self is released from indefinite detention. He stops the interrogation of his lover, and slowly, the porno torture chamber ceases its existence. Before 2001, we had engaged in pschoanalysis. But in the wake of Abu Ghraib, that analysis became thick, and dense, and passionate. It was filled with the pain of others. To release Alan from childhood memories, we had to visit our “social unconscious” (Layton, 2005). We had to resist global demonologies, and restore reverence to sacrificial bodies. This process occurred because, as Stern (1997) put it, “To be a psychoanalyst is inevitably to take a political and moral stand” (p 141).

9 Dignifying the Abject Genocide and State Terror

All too often, our Heroic mythologies have a quality of perversity. They inspire noble deeds, but they also sponsor malevolent ideologies. These malevolent ideologies are the province of the Demonic Hero: a dark figure, who must “destroy the world in order to save it” (Lifton, 1999). We have seen this figure emerge in the discourse of terrorism and counterterrorism. But it is also prevalent in genocide and state terror. Like terrorism, genocide and state terror are often grounded in extremist philosophies.* Propaganda is laced with hate and paranoia: An “Evil Other” (Frankfurter, 2006) is infiltrating the State. Sadism is aroused and unleashed in ordinary citizens. Innocents are marginalized and branded by the State (Foucault, 1979). Then they are eliminated. Collectivities collaborate in atrocity and accede to atrocity (Cohen, 2001). Denial is simultaneous to violence (see Grand, 2000). This denial operates according to language rules (Arendt, 1963) and double-speak (Orwell, 1949). In this discourse, “an all encompassing death would create an all encompassing virtue” (Lifton, 1999, p. 198). In these systems, every act of compassion is infused with terror. With every act of resistance, there is a heightened threat of persecution. Anyone who exposes the State will disappear from the State.† During genocide and state terror, excision is often the price for humane responsiveness. Inhumanity secures the ordinary citizen. Cruelty promises to elevate that citizen. Through brutality, the ordinary can become the elect: They are anointed as Demonic Heroes. Lest people reflect about, and recoil from, their own actions, they are often inducted into a “cult of hardness.”‡ They are praised and rewarded for coldness, ruthlessness, and detachment (see * † ‡

In this chapter, I trace some important commonalities between genocide and state terror, even though these practices have important differences. See Agger (1992) on state terror in Chile. For an example, see Nazism as described by Arendt (1958) and Lifton and Markusen (1988).

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Miale & Selzer, 1975, on Nazism). They are discouraged from forming attachments. Individual will is exaggerated, even as personal agency is diffused (see Browning, 1992). This allows the perpetrator to be emptied of responsibility yet filled with omniscient purity and power (Volkan, 2006; Waller, 2002). Their transgressions are an act of obeisance and devotion through which they preserve the State* while they preserve their own lives. In this malignant transformation, license fuses with grandiosity and wards off death anxiety (see Lifton & Markusen, 1988). To sustain this death-less condition, human bodies must be reduced to abjection prior to their elimination. In this perversity, cruelty becomes Courage; it is patriotism, and it is purification. Violence and the Savior: Renewing the Heroic Cycle In genocide and state terror, Heroic mythologies reach the pinnacle of perversity: Mass murder becomes the Savior of the State. To answer this perversity, we long for a Savior of our own. We want a formidable Hero, whose power can surpass the power of Evil. When Evil is writ large, ordinary heroes tend to shrink once again. What effect can ordinary goodness have on these regimes? Destruction has seized dominance, and the innocent require radical intervention. What formidable force do we have? The small gestures of small heroes: These are lovely in the ordinary course of events. When we confront the full gravity of these events, we want a Savior. This is a very human and humane response. It reflects an empathic and ethical imperative. This response is also problematic. While we wait for the Heroic Other, destructiveness consolidates its dominance. We fail to see and forestall the preconditions of mass violence. When we don’t mobilize our own ordinary goodness, that goodness is neutralized by burgeoning aggression. Then, the enormity of this aggression becomes the proof of our own impotence. Instead of interrupting the cycle of violence, we renew the Heroic cycle. Genocide and state terror escalate, and our responses are sparse, halting, belated. We keep saying “never again,” and we keep ceding the innocent in Rwanda, the Congo, Bosnia, the Sudan. As Dallaire’s (2003) experience in Rwanda indicates, our humanitarian commitments are woefully inadequate. We don’t send in our armies, or if we do, it is *

For further illustrations from the Cambodian genocide, see Nath (1998), Chandler (1999), and Kiernan (2002); on Rwanda, see Gourevitch (1998); on Bosnia, see Tochman (2008); on state terror in Argentina, see Graziano (1992); on state terror in South Africa, see Krog (1998).



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usually too late. If we defer to the Savior, we usually wait for the Savior, and the Demonic Hero becomes ascendant. In this chapter, I examine the problem of courage as it is constituted in genocide and state terror. How does cruelty become the register for Courage? How do ordinary heroes affect mass violence? Is it possible to answer destructiveness without reproducing the Heroic cycle? In revisiting these questions, this book ends where it began. My study of the Hero originated with the Holocaust. During World War II, destructiveness took unthinkable forms. After that war, we had to metabolize those forms. But we had something formidable to assist us: the triumphal force of our fathers’ Courage. Too many were lost, but Goodness had won. In that era, we were inspired, we were reassured, and we received vital wisdom. We were also paralyzed, impulsive, and diminished. We could only admire the Hero and mimic that Hero, while the forces of Evil gathered their strength. Since the end of Nazism, genocide and state terror have recurred throughout the world. Each time this happens, ordinary goodness seems eviscerated by Evil. We have an enfeebled heroic self and an intensified craving for a grandiose Heroic self. We say “never again.” But we are paralyzed; we keep waiting for a Savior to arrive. In revisiting the problem of genocide and state terror, we have a paradoxical challenge. Real villains are enacting real nightmares on innocent bodies. The innocent deserve radical intervention, and we feel inadequate to the task. It is difficult to look into the eye of such sadism. If we look, we must confront the unthinkable and metabolize the unthinkable. Even if we are only reading about what has been done to other bodies, we suffer from vicarious traumatization. We feel enraged and helpless. We need our Heroic imagoes. We are sustained and inspired by these imagoes. But they are insufficient, at best. At worst, they fail to materialize. This, then, is our greatest challenge: At the very moment when Evil seems to eviscerate ordinary goodness, we must awaken the force of that ordinary goodness. We must find our own force, when destructiveness has made us feel impotent. In my view, ordinary goodness is the only answer to genocide and state terror. In mass violence, the I–Thou relationship is under attack. In mass resistance, there is a collective restoration of the I–Thou relationship. We can all engage in this resistance; we can do this in multiple modalities and venues, and we can do it anywhere. We can risk our own lives for the life of another. We can make donations from our armchair. We can fight with weapons of peace. When necessary, we can use the weapons of war. Together, we can mobilize radical interventions. To achieve this, we must

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become a collectivity of small heroes, who act on behalf of the persecuted, without waiting for a Savior to arrive. In this chapter, I evoke the paradoxical challenge of mass violence. I take my reader into unthinkable events. These events will disturb my audience and awaken the desire for a Hero. I will ask my reader to be aware of this desire and to cast doubt on that desire. In this process, my reader becomes a small hero, who can recognize the nobility of other small heroes. Together, we keep focusing on the gestures of ordinary goodness. Each gesture will elicit pathos and awe. In isolation, it will seem inspired and inadequate. But every gesture will refer to another. In the global landscape of terror, there is an expanding human circle, in which millions act on behalf of millions. Every act insists on the I–Thou relationship; it becomes part of an exponential expanse. As we place one gesture into this collective context, we can sense the potent force of ordinary goodness. That force emerges as a radical intervention; it has the potential to stop mass violence. The Hero in the Mirror: Reading the Demonic Hero At this writing, many heroes are engaged in stopping this violence. All of them are aiding the innocent from outside the persecutory machine. In this study, however, these figures will remain in the background. It is the heroism of the abject which is placed into the foreground. Many of us already see and appreciate the heroism of human rights activists. But we rarely see the force of ordinary goodness as it exists inside the machine. In this chapter, I want to illuminate the heroic, as it appears in those who long for a Savior but cannot wait for the Savior to arrive. To locate the force of their ordinary goodness, we must step inside the mechanisms of mass violence. In genocide and state terror, the Demonic Hero takes many forms. The subjugated learn how to read its incarnations, and they learn how to answer those incarnations. They do this for themselves and with the other. In genocide and state terror, victims are often suspended between the imminence of death and the deferral of death. They must negotiate for their lives and for the lives of their loved ones. Victims must find the cracks and the seams within the system. To survive, they must decode their persecutory machine. Imprisoned, they have a dual sense of urgency. They must stay alive, and they must assert their own humanity. In the midst of terror, they learn this: that they must confirm the perpetrator’s “talisman of supremacy” (Girard, 1972), even as they subvert that talisman of supremacy (Scott,



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1992). They must create a surface of compliance and a hidden transcript of activity and resistance. This requires heroic transfiguration. Inside the machine, victims must apprehend the perpetrator’s Heroic demonology. And they must relinquish their own myths of the Heroic Other (regarding torture and state terror, see Agger, 1992). The omniscient Courage of the perpetrator must be appeased. But the victim’s courage must be reinvented. In these conditions, bravery is not a register of moral absolutes or prescribed action. The heroic is whatever cherishes life; it is the preservation of the self; it is the assertion of human bonds; it is a small act of kindness given to another. When the Demonic Hero is perceived, known, and read, these gestures accrue an awesome human power. To comprehend this struggle, we, too, must enter the mythology of genocide and state terror. In Chapter 8, I described the Demonic Hero as it is manifest in terrorism. In some ways, the dynamisms of genocide and state terror echo the psychology of terrorism.* In many ways, the practices of genocide and state terror differ from each other, and they differ from those of suicidal terrorism. These differences are rooted in specific cultural, political, economic, historical, and religious conditions. But they are also rooted in diverse visions of the Heroic body and of Heroic transformation. Cultures have different formulations of the Heroic body. In my view, violent practices are (in part) a collectivized perversion of these formulations. In persecutory epochs, Heroic templates give specific shape to brutality, and they also provide a permit for that brutality. To dignify the abject, we must penetrate this perversion. The abject must adapt to this perversion, and their heroism must answer the shape of this perversion. We cannot grasp the full meaning of their acts unless we study the Heroic body as it undergoes Demonic transformation. Persecutory Myths and Heroic Embodiments Let us look, then, at these differing visions of the Heroic body. In its terrorist incarnation, the Demonic Hero repudiates earthly forms. In an instant, he pulverizes the body of his victim. For this victim, there is no anticipation of death. For this perpetrator, his own life begins with the death of his own material body. Suicide entwines with murder, and the terrorist’s soul awakens in paradise. But in genocide and state terror, the Übermensch, *

There are many important differences between terrorism, genocide, and state terror, but these are not the objects of my study in this chapter.

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the Super-Man uses violence to map his own earthly territory. He* cannot be confirmed in an imaginary afterlife. He is not sated through a single, shared act of bodily extinction. He must remain intact during the abduction, torture, enslavement, and/or killing of the Evil Other (Frankfurter, 2006). Unlike the terrorist, this Demonic Hero is located in a material body. He must inflict pain on a material body, and he must witness that material body in pain. The suicidal terrorist can imagine the extermination of the evil Other. But he cannot live to see it, and he doesn’t need to live to see it. Or perhaps, he can see it, in the hereafter, without material eyes. But his Heroic triumph is not a corporeal triumph. His triumph requires a release from corporeality; it is a repudiation of his earth-bound form. In my view, the Demonic Hero employs differing forms of violence, depending, in part,† on the prevailing vision of Heroic embodiment. Praising the spirit and seeking release from corporeality, the suicidal terrorist engages in a single act of finality and completion. This act is an ecstatic entry into the divine. During genocide, and in a police state, there is no finality or completion. There is an enduring and paranoid regime. This regime constructs a vast, anonymous, persecutory machine. Persecutory mechanisms are operated by remote authorities and agencies, spy networks, secret police, military, and by official edict. The result is ongoing mass violence. Massacres, of course, can occur like a flash-fire (in Rwanda, the Sudan, or Babi Yar, e.g.), in a convulsion of chaos. But in most epochs of genocide and state terror, the anonymous machine can operate for years. Thousands, millions, are cycled toward death. But this rarely involves a linear move toward mass extermination. No, death must have its preliminaries: disappearances, separations, and dislocations. There are abductions, forced marches, mass starvation, homelessness, disease, the death and dispersal of family and friends. There are people missing, who may be dead or alive. There are concentration camps, rape camps, secret prisons, torture centers. Often these are holding pens on the way station to extermination. In these way stations, daily life is located between the deferral and the certainty of death. Abjection becomes an enduring condition. While the prisoner lives, she must navigate her terror. Trying to live, victims anticipate death, but they never know when, or where, or how, it will come. They are befouled and forgotten, and they are caught in a vast, anonymous machine. * †

This perpetrator can be female or male. There are many other factors which determine violent practices.



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In this system, there is a terrible contest over material existence. Although the victim is persecuted by a remote and arbitrary force, there is always a more proximal perpetrator, who is serving the state. This perpetrator inflicts suffering and witnesses that suffering. In these immediate encounters, one corporeal form is in pain, while the other is empowered.* One succumbs, while the other lives. In genocide and state terror, these encounters repeat. They are multiplied by the mechanisms of the State. As I study these forms of violence, I have noticed this: Unlike the suicidal terrorist, this Demonic Hero seems to require the exponential torment of corporeality. To preserve group identity (Volkan, 2006) and the State, cruelty must be inflicted on earthly bodies. This cruelty must be witnessed and survived by earthly bodies. Suicidal terrorism claims to kill the body and release the spirit. Genocide and state terror seem excited by the body of the Übermensch. As Agger (1992) and Graziano (1992) note, torture is often a highly eroticized practice, which confirms the embodied power of the torturer. But this lust can never be sated. To claim the “talisman of supremacy” (Girard, 1972), these regimes require an infinite series of bodies. To buy themselves free of death, their victims must be visible in their destruction and visibly survived by their embodied perpetrator (see Lifton & Markusen, 1988). Then, the perpetrator claims himself as a noble sacrifice: Auschwitz doctors became caught up in the Nazi German principle of killing as a difficult form of personal ideal. … Here, the killer claims for himself the ordeal of sacrifice. To perform the prescribed ritual slaughter, he offers himself and his victims to the immortal German people and its hero-deity, Adolf Hitler. (Lifton, 1986, p. 435)

“Math Murder”: The Destruction of the Name In these systems, innocents are consumed, en masse, by the State. Human bodies are subjected to terrible indignities. There is, of course, a struggle for material existence. But there is also a struggle for human identity. In genocide and state terror, entire groups are stripped of their humanity. Victims become fungible parts in a collectivizing machine. From the moment of abduction, their intimate relationships are violated. And their singularity is lost in a multitude. Human suffering is always personal and particular. But genocide and state terror tend to define their prey as any *

Regarding torture and state terror, see Agger (1992) and Graziano (1992).

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one of many.* Communal structures are undone. Suddenly, a group turns into a chaotic crowd. Of course, there are moments when someone specific is targeted. But in general, the State’s adversary is an extruded group, which is turned into a mass. Once, these victims were like us. They lived in expanding circles of recognition. They had identities, and they were identifiable to others: They had a given name, a familial name, a group name; they could name their intimate relations, their history, and they could name their home. Then every link was broken. By breaking these links, the machine tries to erase particularity and subjectivity (see Cohen, 2001; Kressel, 2002). This is achieved through radical dislocation, helplessness, pain, and humiliation. But it is also achieved by actually removing the prisoner’s name. Often, the prisoner is already lost in a crowd. Then they lose their name and acquire a number. Losing their name, they become no one. Acquiring a number, they become an enumerated object. They are terrorized as any one of many. During the reign of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, there was an infamous prison, called S-21. Approximately 40,000 people were interrogated and killed there. A few survived. At S-21, prisoners were photographed before their execution. The photographer’s name was recorded, but the prisoner’s name was not: “Forever looking at death, forever about to be murdered, forever wronged. … Those he photographed, with their stunned faces, their emaciated torsos, the # tag pinned to the top of their shirts, (they) remain an aggregate: anonymous victims” (Sontag, 1997, p. 61). This type of record keeping echoes the procedures of the Nazis. During the Holocaust, a number was tattooed on the prisoner’s arm. At roll call, prisoners were referred to by this number. After gassing and cremation, there was a notation by number (see Levi, 1961). Writing about genocide, Lyotard (1991) suggests that perpetrators of mass violence destroy the individual name and the collective name. In her study of transgenerational madness, Davoine (2007) also points to this destruction of the name. Disparate practices can achieve this effect. But all of these practices turn a human subject into an enumerated object. During American slavery, Africans were kidnapped as any one of many. If they endured the Middle Passage,† they acquired a price tag and then a slave * †

During torture, the victim is often targeted as a specific individual. More often, they are a member of a defiled group, and their individual identity is essentially irrelevant. For a description, see Soyinka (1999).



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name.* During Apartheid, the disappeared had their fingertips cut off, so that their fingerprints would be missing. These bodies became unidentifiable objects (Krog, 1998). During World War II, the “comfort women” were listed as “war supplies,” forced into sex slavery, and given Japanese names in rape camps (Hicks, 1994). In 1995, 8,370 Muslims were massacred, because the Bosnian Serb general, Radislav Krstić, told his men, “All of them need to be killed—whatever you can lay hands on” (Simons, 2003, p. A5, italics added). In all of these atrocities, a human being becomes an unidentified, nonhuman object. They are lost in a sea of nonhuman objects. In the aftermath of these events, a death count often fills the space where identity should have been. With the best of intentions, our conversations take place in the arithmetic register. How many were eliminated? When, where, in what order? In what categories and classifications? When our speech utilizes this lexicon, mass violence has had its effect: It has turned human subjects into enumerated objects. Holt (2006) has described this effect by referring to mass murder as math murder. This, then, is the language of math murder: “In 1995, 8,370 Muslims were massacred.” According to Holt, the agents of math murder are enthralled with dates, times, statistics, methodologies, and demographics. They seem to lust for blood. But they also seem to lust for large numbers. They like exponential figures; they are excited by body counts (Arendt, 1963). In genocide and state terror, numeric systems unname the human subject. They create empathic distance and construct “efficient” operations. But this numeric objectification also enhances the psychic dynamism which I described at the beginning of this chapter. While this perpetrator is inflicting suffering on another material body, the perpetrator is unnaming his victim and naming himself as the exclusive material subject. He asserts this status, over and over, in an exponential expanse. Reading about this, most of us cannot imagine having to endure this. Ordinary goodness seems impotent, and we long for the Hero. Our longing reflects the longing of the abject, as they wait for humanitarian and military intervention. But the abject cannot wait for the Hero to arrive. They must find whatever power resides in their own courage. To answer and resist these forms of mass violence, and they must learn to recognize the peculiar shape of this destruction: the way it exalts and annihilates the material body; the way it suctions out named particularity and transforms *

There is an extensive argument about whether slavery should be considered genocide. For my purposes, this is irrelevant; it was certainly a regime of mass violence. For a discussion of this issue, see, for example, Drescher (2001).

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human subjects into enumerated objects. To answer this form of violence, heroic practices must turn an enumerated object back into a human subject. Inside the machine, victims fight for their material existence. But they also take the name of their own humanity. In the midst of degradation, they reverse the terms of their own enumeration and reinvent the I–Thou relation. These gestures can seem dwarfed by the anonymous machine. Nonetheless, they represent a formidable heroic: the miraculous endurance of ordinary goodness. Restoring the Name: Inside the Persecutory Machine No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, No one conjures our dust. No one. A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering; the nothing —, the no one’s rose “Psalm” (Celan, 1972, p. 175)*

In trauma studies (see Boulanger, 2007; Laub & Auerhahn, 1993) we have long recognized the “no one” who survives mass persecution.† As Laub (1995) notes, these systems attempt to destroy the I and the Thou. A “some one” enters the machine, and that someone turns into “no one.” In his refrain, Celan is reminding us of this “no one.” But Celan is also suggesting that there is a “no one’s rose”: something blooming through the rubble. For me, this image links abasement and resilience. It underlines despair and dehumanization, but it also recalls the resourcefulness and the dignity of the abject. In genocide and state terror, victims navigate danger. They fight for life. They share tenderness; they form human bonds; they hide each other and plan escapes; they take blows for one another; they nurse each other; they give each other food, even when they are starving.‡ As Ornstein (1985) and others suggest, these gestures preserve the self, and they preserve the integrity of I–Thou relatedness. To dignify the abject, these moments must be placed into widening circles of reverence and recognition. As psychoanalysts devoted to trauma studies, we must * † ‡

Celan survived the Nazi persecution (see Celan, 1972). See Caruth (1995); Grand (2000); Laub and Auerhahn (1993); Laub and Podell (1995). Examples emerge later in this chapter.



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witness the “no one’s rose.” How does an enumerated object assert her human subjectivity? How does she take the name of her own humanity and name the humanity of others? Enumerated Objects Become Enumerated Subjects Many years ago, I began to think about genocide and the way an enumerated object becomes a human subject. I was in my early 20s. A friend introduced me to Sarah. Sarah was an older woman. She was brash, flamboyant, and funny. She wore a very large diamond ring. The diamonds carved out a number, which matched the number tattooed on her arm. Each time someone asked about the ring, she told its story. In the Nazi death camps, she kept people alive by stealing food and medicine. She lost relatives, and she created new bonds. With her ring, she vitalized memory. She spit at death, and she reconceived time.* The ring was a retrospective; it referred back to the time when the ring only existed as a prospective imaginary. In the camp, Sarah imagined herself enumerated with diamonds. She starved, she went dead, she tried to stay alive, and she was hollow. But in her mind, she named and nullified her own abjection. After the war, she took a dual name: the name of Sarah and the name of her number. She retrieved her singularity. But her singularity was always inscribed with a multitude. She lived in both the intimate and in the collectivized registers. Wearing her ring, an enumerated object was in a continuous state of becoming. She was becoming an enumerated subject, and she was recovering her identity. Her human specificity kept emerging from the body count. Every day, her ring testified to that body count. This process began while she was in the death camp. During the Holocaust, Sarah’s traumatized self had its singularity prohibited (Cohen, 2001). To give that traumatized self a name: This required new naming rituals. After the war, she struggled, and she saved, and she had her number wrought in diamonds. Everywhere she went, she commanded a paradoxical form of recognition. She reproduced a collectivity, and she moved that collectivity into, and out of, intimate spaces. Her rebellion was both private and public; it kept occurring en masse and in the intimacy of personal dialogue. During the war, she created human bonds. She refused the terms of the Demonic Hero. But she also read the duality of math murder: She tried to retrieve *

For a discussion of the posttraumatic experience of time, see Reis (1995).

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singularity, even as she hid that singularity in a multitude.* She created intimate attachments, but she concealed those attachments from the eyes of the perpetrator. She deferred to the “talisman of supremacy.” But she engaged in subversive acts. She claimed a mental space inside of herself. She held an imaginary ring inside her mind. That ring named memory; it named the future, it named herself, and it named the lost. Sarah’s ring signifies a state of traumatic transit. In her diamonds, enumerated objects are always moving toward enumerated subjectivity, and enumerated subjectivity moves toward human specificity. In the narratives of other survivors, we find a similar heroic register. They reverse the meaning of their number. In the anonymous machine, enumeration demarcates abjection. In resistance activity, the number is transfigured: It offers the shelter of obscurity, it becomes a covert site of agency, and it can become a conduit to life. Here is Anna Ornstein’s (1985) description of a survivor of Auschwitz: Being tattooed was to indicate the prisoner’s slave status; not being registered with one’s name, the number was to obliterate the last vestige of personhood. But in Auschwitz, the occasion of being tattooed gave rise to joy and a renewal of hope … In camp to be tattooed could mean the difference between being sent to a work camp or being sent to a crematoria. (p. 112)

In this description, a prisoner turns her number into an expanse of time. She is trapped in an extermination machine. But she reads her Demonic Hero. She adapts and finds the seams and cracks within the system. She embraces her number and changes its sign. Suddenly it confers life instead of death; it demarcates beginnings as well as endings. It insinuates a future. Here a prisoner finds a window of agency: She can find a way to stay alive. In reconceiving her number, she restores the continuum of time. The continuity of time is one of the hallmarks of human subjectivity. In the life world, there is a relationship between past, present, and future. In persecutory machines, Demonic Heroes try to stop time, as Reis (1995) would suggest. But to Ornstein, this prisoner creates a “spiral model” of temporality, “where future and past condition and signify each other reciprocally in the structuring of the present” (Baranger, Baranger, & Mom, 1998, p. 116). The prisoner takes time back, as her human right and as her own possession. Caught in the death world, she creates a link to the life world. *

Regarding Cambodia, see Kiernan (2002); regarding African American slavery, see Fox-Genovese (1988) and Raboteau (2004).



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She* creates meaning from her thing-ness and embarks on a journey of survival. To Ornstein (1985) this journey is always linked to the creation of human bonds. Obscured by vast numbers, one person becomes linked to another person. This link operates outside the perpetrator’s view. A parallel exists in the narrative of Loung Ung (2000), who survived the Cambodian genocide. When it began, she was 5 years old. When it ended, there were 1.7 million gone. With her parents and siblings, Ung endured forced labor, starvation, disease, degradation, dislocation. Her beloved father was executed. Her mother knows that she and the children will all be executed if they stay together. To keep her children alive, the mother sends her children away. Loung must change her name, leave her mother, wander alone, pretend to be an orphan. She is lost, in vast numbers. While she is separated from her family, she, too, reverses her own enumeration. She counts: Geak is six now. She is a year older than I was when the Khmer Rouge took over the country three years ago. It has been six months since I visited Ro Leap when Ma showed me her bruises. Nine months since I pulled my hand out of Chou’s grasp. Twelve months since I said good-bye to Kim, seventeen months since the soldiers took Pa away, twenty-one months since Keav … I don’t understand, counting dates is the only sane thing I know to do. (2000, p. 152)

Counting, Ung retrieves the continuity of time, and she links one person to another, beloved person. An 8-year-old child, Ung is feisty, she is resourceful, and she learns how to survive. She lives in I–Thou memory. She records her own history, and she inscribes that history with love and loss. Alone in an “orphan’s camp” run by the Khmer Rouge, she is indoctrinated with hatred and violence. She is trained to kill her own “capitalist” mother. She can speak to no one about what she really thinks or what she feels. But she sustains a private, interior space, and she cannot be indoctrinated. She stays alive, she endures, and she keeps faith with her family. Ung’s father was resourceful, gentle, and kind. He encouraged her independence, her intelligence, and her ability to ask questions. His presence made her feel safe during the first phase of the genocide. After he was executed, he lived on inside of her. “I do possess the one thing I need to make something of myself one day: I have everything my Pa gave me” (p. 183). After his death, she grieved, and her family was dispersed. She had to manage alone. She used the gifts her father had given her. She did, indeed, seem to have him with her. Wandering alone, she knows what counts, even after her parents are lost to the body count. *

The sex of this survivor is unclear in Ornstein’s description.

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Refusing Enumeration: Mothers and Children Name Each Other In conditions of mass violence, the abject keep taking the name of their own humanity. They reinvent the I–Thou relationship, when that relationship is under attack. They sustain attachments, and form new attachments, and find ways to keep each other alive (Ornstein, 1985; Pawelczynska, 1979). In their memoirs, survivors describe the critical role of human bonding. They describe moments of tenderness, when the number almost ceases to exist. Human beings are no longer in transit through math murder: They are not enumerated objects and they are not trying to become enumerated subjects. They are in intimate relationships of concern. In these relationships, they experience the full range of human feeling (Ornstein, 1985). They are particular, recognizable, giving, and receiving. In fragmentary slices of time, a private world seems to appear. Me and you. A few of us. A small family. Us. Taking care of each other, in loyalty, tenderness, solidarity. Briefly, the world is something like it was, before. In Ung’s memoir of the Cambodian genocide, there are moments of familial tenderness and cohesion, in which everyone is together, comforting one another. In these moments, there is a renewal of what Laub and Auerhahn (1989) call “the protective parental shield.” In genocide and state terror, the machine is continually breaking down the protective parental shield. To take the name of their own humanity, victims reassert the elemental link of compassion: the link between parents and their children. This can occur between actual parents and their children or in newly formed relations of mutual caretaking.* Whether this is done through covert subversion or through overt rebellion, the act of caretaking is always one of risk. Threat hovers over every relationship. The machine doesn’t like to see attachments; it doesn’t want its authority undermined by the trace of parental love. And yet the subjugated keep forming bonds. Every attachment refers back to first attachments: the bond of love in which we all receive our human name. Mutual caregiving sustains the internalized parent, and it asserts the human name. Sometimes, the parental figure is actually there, inside the machine. Parental caregiving can be immobilized by the Demonic Hero, but it can also triumph over the Demonic Hero. In African American slavery, families were always in danger of being sold. When families were intact, the sheltering functions of parents were severely limited. But a slave mother fights the overseer for abusing her children: *

Regarding the Holocaust, see Pawelczynska (1979).



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My mammy [recalled Fannie Moore of South Carolina] she work in de field all day and piece and quilt all night … I never see how my mammy stand such hard work. She stand up for her chillen though. De old overseer he hate my mammy, ’cause she fought him for beatin’ her chillen. Why she get more whippin for dat dan anythin’ else. (Genovese, 1976, p. 499)

So that even a slaveholder can be awed by the power of the maternal shield: John Randolph of Roanoke, a slaveholder himself, who had known Patrick Henry, Henry Clay and all the great political orators of the day and who himself ranked at the top, was asked whom he thought to have pride of place. “The greatest orator I ever heard,” he replied, “was a woman. She was slave and a mother and her rostrum was an auction block.” (p. 456)

And a slave could be restored to a human name:* William Wells Brown reflected on his mother’s having been sold south and on the probability of her early death: ‘As I thought of my mother, I could not but feel that I had lost “The glory of my life/My blessing and my pride!/I half forgot the name of slave/When she was by my side.” (p. 499)

To be in the presence of mother, to take shelter in intimate connection, to “half-forget” one’s condition of math murder: It is in this way that Bodenstab (2004) describes mother–daughter survival in Bergen-Belsen. Mother and daughter are starving, liberation is nearing, but everyone around them is dying. The daughter, Jolly, spends a day digging pits and “earns” an extra bowl of soup. She brings it to her mother, Rosalie. Each of them refuses to eat; each of them insists that the other eat. Then, the daughter says, “We both have to survive.” So we decided to share it. My mother took a spoon, but the spoon was empty. She hardly took anything. And when I took a spoon, it was also empty, because I didn’t want to take much that she should have. So we realized that we’re not getting anywhere, and we decided to feed each other. So she was feeding me, and I was feeding her. And that bowl of soup most likely really saved us, because in a day or two we were liberated. (p. 735)

To Bodenstab, these women stay alive through mutual caregiving. Mother and daughter are named in relationship to each other; for a moment, the number ceases to exist. *

The issue of slave naming was fraught, because slaves could only take the names of their masters. Still this was often preferable to being called “boy.” See Genovese (1976).

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As we, the readers, consider these moments, we may find ourselves caught between awe and despair. We are inspired by the dignity and the resourcefulness of the abject. What would we do, if we were inside the machine? And then the story flips over again, and we are suffused with helpless rage. Why are we focusing on a shared bowl of soup when we need radical forms of intervention? How did we allow people to be in this condition? Who is going to get them out? These are essential questions; we must not narrow our lens or adjust to others’ subjugation. But these questions can also overcome us; they can tilt us toward a search for a Savior. Instead, let us focus on the heroic acts of rescuers, who risk their lives to save another life. Refusing the Number: Rescuing the Persecuted During persecutory epochs, rescuers also restore the parental shield. They are moved by human suffering, and they intervene (see Fogelman, 1994; Goren, 2007; Tec, 1986; Thomas, 2005). They respond to someone in need. They help, even when they have reason to be frightened about their own safety and the safety of their children. In these moments, specific faces emerge from the crowd. One person, a few people, a family, a small group which can expand into a large one. In the act of rescue, every one of them is restored to human reverence: They are identified and identifiable. To rescuers, every person is someone’s child. Every person has a name and a claim on our humanity. During the genocide in Rwanda, Rusesabagina (2006) saved 1,268 people in his hotel. He out-talked and outwitted murderers and kept everyone alive. He existed in a continual, humanizing tension with math murder. Writing about 800,000 people slaughtered, by hand, in 100 days, he expresses his reverence for human attachment: Eight hundred thousand lives snuffed out in one hundred days. That’s eight thousand lives a day. More than five lives per minute. Each one of those lives was like a little world in itself. Some person who laughed and cried and ate and thought and felt just like any other person, just like you and me. A mother’s child, everyone irreplaceable. (p. xi)

And so, he gave shelter to every mother’s child who could arrive at his door. He finds nothing extraordinary in this. To Rusesabagina, he was only doing what any ordinary man would do. He cannot do otherwise. In this, he echoes the refrain of rescuers, who do not see themselves as Heroes (see Fogelman, 1994; Geis, 1987; Goren, 2007; Tec 1986; Thomas,



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2005). He is frightened all of the time. But, his ethical imperative remains clear. Perhaps he can act as the protective, parental shield because he is sustained by that shield. A good “father” to his persecuted “children,” Rusesabagina reflects on his own father: It occurred to me later: I had seen this before. My father had opened our tiny hillside home to refugees during the Hutu revolution of 1959. I had been a young boy then, a little older than my son Tresor. My father’s favorite proverb came back to me: If a man can keep a fierce lion under his roof, why can he not shelter a fellow human being? (p. 84)

In his heroic acts, Rusesabagina has a meeting with math murder. He answers their numbers with his own, extraordinary, numbers: 1,268 people, saved. Each of them restored to personhood, to intimate attachments, to family. Together, they create a community of survival, in his hotel. In Rusesabagina, as for most rescuers, this begins in a moment of crisis, in direct encounters with people in need. After the Machine: The Tenderness of Memory Someone like Rusesabagina inspires us. Every day, he risked his own life. In the end, he saved significant numbers. When we look into the eye of mass violence, we are reassured by these numbers. In encounters with genocide, we are always measuring the saved against the lost. To answer math murder, we find ourselves quantifying ordinary goodness. How much does it take to have any effect? One small gesture can move us, but it doesn’t seem to move the system. And so, we too ask arithmetic questions. When large numbers are persecuted, we must fight for large numbers. Studying the processes of liberation, rescue, and resistance, we want to know: when, where, how; in what categories of action; in what order? How do we multiply these effects? In the context of mass violence, these questions are necessary and inevitable. They are human, and they are humane. There are millions to be saved; they must be saved by millions. When I–Thou commitments reach a critical mass, the persecutory regime is usually defeated. To protect present and future victims, we do need vast numbers of our own. We need human rights activism, political activism, humanitarian intervention, economic investment, conflict resolution, military intervention, trauma treatment, and collective memory.

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But as we are multiplying our own numbers, we also need to recall intimate moments, when hate yields to compassion. Let us return to Bosnia, 1992. Ethnic cleansing was raging. Neighbors slaughtered neighbors. There were rape camps and large massacres. War reporter Hedges (2002) tells us this story. Zoran Sorek and his wife were Serbs, but they never accepted anti-Muslim propaganda. Their Serb village had changed hands; it was now dominated by Muslims. They hated the Soreks, because the Serbs had slaughtered their people. Zoran was abducted, and he never returned. Five months later, Zoran’s wife gave birth to a girl. She was a Serb, in enemy territory. There were food shortages, her breasts had no milk, and she could not feed her baby girl. Fejzic, a Muslim, was keeping his cow in a field. On the fifth day without milk, someone arrived at the door: It was Fadil Fejzic in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk. He came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to the Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came for 442 days, until … [we] left for Serbia. (p. 52)

In this provision of milk, one soul is linked to two other souls. The cycle of hatred stops. Destined for death, an infant is reclaimed by life. This gesture is the antidote to math murder. Hedges returns, and finds Fejzic, after the genocide is over. Fejzic is destitute, he lives in a hut, his cow was slaughtered for its meat. He had only a thin, worn coat to protect him from the winter cold. When we spoke he sat huddled in the corner of a dank, concrete-walled room rubbing his pathetic collection of small apples, many with brown holes in them, against his sleeve. When I told him I had seen the Soraks, his eyes brightened. “And the baby?” he asked. “How is she?” (pp. 51–52)

Now, in the tenderness of memory, all of humanity seems saved. A baby has been twice born. Once, she was named in a sea of hatred. Then, she was named by an ocean of hope.

Epilogue Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek. (Obama, 2008a)*

As I come to the ending of writing this book, Barack Obama has been in the White House for less than 100 days. In the United States, we are inspired by our new president, but we know that small heroes put him in office. We have pride in Obama, and we have pride in ourselves. As we share this miracle, perhaps we can begin to imagine another miracle: the end of global violence. What if millions of small gestures became linked to each other across the world? What if reverence infused those gestures? What if we could admit to our collective fear and grief and honor our ordinary heroes? Each of us might perform an action which would demonstrate solidarity with the abject (see Fanon, 1963). Together, we might contain the force of destruction. For us to have this effect, we must stop anointing the Heroic Other, and we must stop waiting for the Heroic Other, and we must find the heroic in communal experience. This would allow us to create an alternative culture, in which there is a reversal of figure and ground. Ordinary heroes would join hands and accrue power. The agents of destruction would be isolated and diminished. Imagine Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein, bereft of our compliance, alone in a crowd. How far would their megalomania take them? Their cruelty might find a few victims. But it wouldn’t turn into war or terrorism, genocide or state terror. As a psychoanalyst versed in the clinical and cultural problems of evil, I believe that destructiveness is inherent in the human condition. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot: These figures were what Canetti (1960) referred to as “crowd crystals” (p. 75). They gave license to our worst proclivities, and they were licensed by our worst proclivities. But at other times in history, we have conjured our best inclinations. We have conjured great leaders, who have functioned as another type of “crowd crystal”: They are inspired by human dignity, and they inspire us to pursue human dignity. At these times, we find people power and become a contagion of courage. Witness, for example, Gandhi, the civil rights movement, the “velvet revolutions,”† and all of the peace and pro-democracy movements which * †

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama, Super-Tuesday speech, February 5, 2008. As well as all of the other non-violent resistance activity cited in previous chapters.

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have ameliorated violence throughout the world. Witness the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2009. In every one of these grassroots movements, effectiveness relied on the small gesture of the small hero. Eventually, communal goodness reached a critical mass. As goodness became a critical mass, it crossed the threshold of helplessness and invisibility. When American citizens worked to elect Obama, they repudiated the legacy of slavery, and they repudiated the Bush administration. Through communal activism, cruelty lost its permit; it yielded to human decency. Of course, this happens too rarely and too slowly. In the long journey toward the election of Obama, African Americans were enslaved; they were lynched; they were murdered, beaten, and jailed for pursuing their civil rights (see Lewis, 2009, p. 103). This bloody history of course is not unique to the African American experience. Every successful grassroots movement grieves for the lost, the wounded, and the dead. While the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marched in Argentina, thousands were tortured and disappeared. About genocide, we keep saying “never again.” While we were saying “never again,” Rwanda burned, and right now, the Sudanese are being massacred. In such conditions of extremity, nonviolent people power seems woefully inadequate. Intervention seems to require firepower. Nonviolent grassroots movements may inspire us, but too many are sacrificed while we are waiting for them to take effect. Does this mean, then, that nonviolent resistance is idealistic and insufficient? Is firepower inevitable and necessary? Or could people power accrue greater speed, precision, mobility, and force? Could we become our own precision weaponry? Of course, this sounds impossibly naive. But if we could become our own precision weaponry, we would never reach such conditions of extremity. We would diminish mass violence, and we would diminish the need for counterviolence. I end this book with what may seem to be a naive proposition: that we can ignite a contagion of courage. This contagion can prevent mass destruction, and it can function as an antidote to such destruction. Elsewhere (Grand, 2000), I have described the reproduction of evil as a system of “malignant dissociative contagion.” Now, I am imagining an answering swell of human goodness: a contagion of concern, in which evil cannot reproduce itself. At the moment of this writing, the whole world is burning. Millions of small heroes worked to elect Barack Obama here, in the United States. In these dark days, he offers us a sense of hope and possibility. But to sustain that hope, we must not surrender to him as our new Heroic Other. Obama is a “crowd crystal” of human resourcefulness,



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thoughtfulness, and dignity. He is the manifestation of our people power. His arrival was grounded in our best proclivities, and he exhorts our best proclivities. He stood before millions in Washington, D.C., and delivered his inaugural address. His speech acknowledged the ordinary heroes who placed him in office. He called upon us to sustain our own heroic momentum. He asked us to become a communal force of concern. As we witness the dignity, thoughtfulness, and grace of our new president, we need to remember that we are witnessing ourselves. We are looking at the hero in our own mirror. Now, we need to enhance the power of this moment. For this to occur, we need to remember that we periodically have great leaders. But those leaders emerge from our own “social unconscious” (Layton, 2006). They are, in Scott’s (1992) terms, the public manifestation of our collective resistance activity. They are noble and inspirational. But they are not the Heroic Other, separate from ourselves. They are the aggregate of the small hero. Our great leaders know this. They share the perspective espoused by Bishop Tutu, during the anti-Apartheid struggle: “In the African Weltanschauung, a person is not basically an independent, solitary entity. A person is human precisely in being enveloped in the community of other human beings, in being caught up in the bundles of life. To be … is to participate” (Krog, 1998, p. 144). Our great leaders retain some modesty. They have feet of clay, and they know it. They derive their power from us, and they use their power for us. They surely enjoy our adoration and their elevated status. Narcissism, competitiveness, grandiosity: These traits are part of being human. But our greatest leaders are never comfortable with our expectations of perfection, and they are never quite comfortable on their pedestal. They may conjure themselves as the Heroic Other, but they chafe in this projection (see Oates, 1982, on Martin Luther King). While we gaze at them, they try to redirect our gaze, so that we find ourselves looking at each other (see Gandhi’s autobiography, 1957). By redirecting our gaze, they insist that we honor the “ordinary men and women who have extraordinary vision” (Lewis, 2009, p. 104). They illuminate the foot soldiers of peace, who “see beyond the limitations of injustice and believe in a cause greater than themselves” (p. 104). After Obama’s inauguration, John Lewis (2009) wrote an eloquent testimonial to this ordinary hero, from whom Obama had emerged and whom Obama had acknowledged: In the movement, we were blessed to look toward the leadership of some of the best minds in America—people like Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, A. Philip Randolph and Walter White. But ours was not a movement

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Epilogue of leaders… . It took the butlers and waiters, porters and street sweepers. They were the marching feet that filled the city and county jails. … They were transformed into warriors of peace. They bore the burden in the heat of the day and braved the terror of night. … It took the forgotten of this nation, people heaped with every disadvantage and despised for their lowliness. It took them to rise up and defend their humanity to save us from ourselves. … They stood in unmovable lines, and kept standing, day in and day out, persistently waiting on the courthouse steps trying to register to vote. They were evicted from their farms, fired from their jobs, and run out of their towns. (pp. 104–105)

What Lewis recalls, Gandhi and Martin Luther King knew: Great leaders are the manifestation of people power. Inside the abject, there is always a “warrior of peace.” The instruments of justice do not belong to our great leaders. The instruments of justice can be placed into anyone’s hands. In the right conditions, ordinary people can become a very determined community. In the civil rights era, African Americans affected a whole nation by walking instead of taking a bus. Marching, sitting at the front of a bus, applying to vote, desegregating lunch counters and schools: Every “small” gesture was a great act of endurance and courage. These acts were met with brutal repression. But this repression was exposed before the public eye, and a nation was shamed into changing its laws. In these historical moments, great leaders are harnessing the force of the ordinary hero. The ordinary hero is having a formidable effect. In every chapter of this book, I have tried to illuminate this potential—in the consulting room and on the cultural stage. Still, in 2009, there is a stunning tide of global destruction. We cannot really imagine the global dominance of goodness. Even if we believe in the human spirit, even if we are human rights activists, even if we are eternal optimists—most of us feel resigned to the dominance of destruction. We may resist destructiveness and have some local success, but “Evil” just overcomes us somewhere else. Despite our grand Heroic tropes and noble ideals, Evil always seems more powerful than Goodness. Looking at the state of the world, this seems to be an accurate reading of our condition. But I want to end this book by proposing another possibility: that goodness can become more powerful than destruction. I am suggesting that this is not a naive proposition but rather a necessary one. Addressing the threat of nuclear war, Martin Luther King long ago suggested that “our choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is between nonviolence and nonexistence” (Edelman, 2008). Lifton (1987) has taken a similar view. Now we have failed states with nuclear arms. The Middle East is already on fire. The worldwide economic collapse has exposed the extent of human greed. Poverty, global



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warming, political, ethnic, and religious dissension, and the ubiquity of weapons: It feels like apocalyptic violence is coming. Our cynicism and despair certainly seems justified. But if we don’t imagine the dominance of goodness, we will not mobilize our resources to stop the conflagration. Why can’t we imagine winning this struggle with mass destruction? Is destructiveness really the salient force in human nature? Why do we have so much trouble turning ourselves into a critical mass of solidarity, compassion, and resistance? Why do we keep re-creating scenarios in which violence must be countered with more violence? Throughout the history of human thought, excellent minds have pondered these questions. In this book, I have suggested that the supremacy of destructiveness is caused, in part, by our attachment to the Heroic Other. In our psyches and in our cultures, the Heroic Other appears as a seductive and mythic force. It is inspiring, alienating, and paralytic. It is grounded in its opposition to Villainy. Every time we conjure our Heroic Other, an opposing Villain is conjured into existence. This Heroic Other seems to save us from Evil, but it actually reproduces it. It also leaches strength from the ordinary hero. When strength is leached from the ordinary hero, we cannot form an ongoing contagion of courage. We can only wait for a great leader and imagine that our power resides in that leader. Our culture will become an ongoing theater of destruction. Periodically, a savior will appear. Sometimes, that savior will empower ordinary courage. We will have a rare historic moment, in which we feel our possibilities. But our momentum will tend to peak and fade. The election of Obama is this kind of historical moment. If we anoint him as our savior, we risk deferring our courage to him. At the pinnacle of hope, hope will peak and fade. To keep faith with our new president, we must keep faith with ourselves. As Obama (2009b) recently put it, in a speech on nuclear disarmament, “I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices of peace and progress must be raised together.” Together, we must envision this contagion of peace. We must continue to query our Heroic mythology, so that the hero in the mirror can keep coming into view. We must find our own courage, and we need to find the courage which exists in others. In every encounter with destructiveness, we must retrieve our own agency and facilitate the I–Thou relationship.

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Index

A Abandonment, 129 Abject, weaponry of, 104 Abjection, 176 Abu Ghraib, 158, 160–161, 166, 168 Action, gender roles and, 31–32 Activism, 187, 190 Activist narratives, 16–17 Adoption, 141, 143 Adulthood, 15, 81 Aggression, 161–162 Alan, 160–169 Alcohol, 140, 167 Alice (Carroll), 98–111 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 99–104 Alien others, 99 Alienation, 21, 25–30, 74 Altman, Neil, 159 Anne, 120–133 Anonymous victims, 178 Apartheid, 179, 191 Arab Americans, 89–90 Argentina, 61, 190 Arousal, 149, 150 Attachments, 184 Auschwitz, 40, 157, 182 Authority, Alice and, 99–100 Autobiographical subjectivity, 44

B Beast, Peter as, 46, 62–63 Bed-wetting, 75 Benign powers, 78 Bergen-Belsen, 185 Bewilderment, 100–104 Black hole of nothingness, 76–78 Blindness, 44, 47–48 Bloodletting, 9 Body image, 140, 144–145 Bondage, 165–166 Books, 86–87, 91–92 Bosnia, 179, 188 Boulanger, Ghislaine, 159

Bras, 87 Bravery, interaction and, 18 Breasts, 87 Brett (The Sun Also Rises), 35–37 Bullfighting, 35–36 Bush, George W., 60, 157–158, 159 Bystanders, passive, 5

C Cambodia, 157, 178, 183 Carroll, Lewis, 98–111 Catastrophic dissociation, 160 Catastrophic loneliness, 135, 152 Caterpillar, 101–102 Cats, 101 Chary of nostrums, 27–28 Children, 15, 76–78, 80–84. See also Kate Chronicles, 16, 120–133 Circles of mutuality, 38–41 Civil rights movement, 189, 190–192 Civilians, 21, 25–30, 33–34, 38 Civilized passage of arms, 116 Class, 124–125, 131–132 A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 163 Coffins, 48 Coldness, 23–24, 43–44 Collectivity of small heroes, 174, 191 Colonialism, 100 Comfort women, 179 Communal goodness, 190 Communalization of combat, 27 Communication technology, 29 Compassion, 94, 171 Complexity, transfiguration and, 96 Compliance, 175 Compromise, ethics and, 89–91 Concentration camps, 4–5, 40, 181–182, 185 Concern, 98 Conflict, personal vs. political, 5, 160 Conformity, 82–83, 95 Conrad, Joseph, 58 Constriction, 94–96 Contagion of courage, 190–191, 193 Costumes, 90 Counterterrorism, 157–160

209

210

Index

Counting, 183 Courage Alice and, 98–99, 100–101 contagion of, 190–191, 193 as essence, 6–7 false, 19, 129–130 Kate and, 87, 88 as sacrifice, 6, 8 Cow, milk and, 188 Creative doubt, 119 Creativity, 76–78, 97 Critical consciousness, 103 Croquet, 103–104 Crowd crystals, 189, 190–191 Cruelty, 165–166, 173 Cult of hardness, 171–172 Cultural blindness, 44, 47–48 Curiosity, 99

D Dachau, 5 Damsels in distress, 108, 110 Danger, inquiry and, 97–98 Dead mother, zone of, 77 Death, 147–148, 174–175 Decency, 103 Dehumanization, 156 Deindividualization, 61 Delusions, 147–148 Demon lovers of violence, 9 Demonic Heroes, 155–160, 175–177 Denial, 171 Desire, 24, 26–30, 33–34, 121 Despair, loneliness and, 38 Destruction, 7, 36–37 Detachable villains, 158 Detention centers, 157 Diamonds, 181 Dignity, 180–181 Directions, 11–12 Dirty Wars (South America), 157 Dislike, 124 Dislocation, 178 Dissociation, 160 Distance, geographic, psychic, and polemic, 26 Dominance of goodness, 190–193 Domination, 161–162, 164 Double binds, 123–124, 126 Doubt action and, 96 creative, 119 as ethical force, 96 fascist state of mind and, 133

Freud and, 115–116 morals, ethics and, 98 Dreams, Alice and, 110–111 Due process, 157–158

E Ecstasy, 155 Ecstatic goodness, courage as, 6–7 Ego, 116 Elasticity, 104 Embarkation, 12–13 Embodiment, Demonic Heroes and, 176 Empowerment, 177 Endurance without need, 117–119 England, Lynndie, 164 Enumerated objects, 178, 180, 181–187 Eroticism, 29–30, 177 Esophagus, 160–161, 163 Essence, courage as, 6–7 Ethical inquiry, 96–98, 104, 110, 116 Ethics, Kate and, 89–91 Ethnic cleansing, 188 Ethnicity, 89 Excitement, civilian-soldier divide and, 26–27 Exclusive material subjects, 179 Excrement, 127–128 Existential anxiety, 75 Exponential torment of corporeality, 177 Exposure, narratives of, 30–34 Extermination, 176

F Failed treatments, 135–136 Failures, 120–133 False courage, 19, 129–130 False danger, 97–98 Fantasy, children and, 79–80 Fascism, 4 Fascism, Alice and, 100 Fascist state of mind, 93, 96, 133 Fathers, 124, 131, 144 Fear, 17–18, 75, 99, 147–148 Fejzic, Fadil, 188 Firebombing, 23, 43, 45 Freud, Sigmund, 115–118

G Gandhi, Mohandas, 189 Gardeners, 103–104 Gazing, objects and, 9, 16 Gender, 28–29, 31–32, 122–123, 164

Genocide, 171–188, 190 Gestures, transcendent, 9 Ghosts, 136–137 Global dominance of goodness, 190–193 Goodness, 6–7, 76, 187, 192–193 Grandiosity, 191 Grassroots movements, 190 Great Depression, 8 Green Belt movement, 61–62 Grief, Peter and, 53 Group identity, 177, 178 Guantánamo Bay, 159, 165, 168 Guilt, 24–25, 100, 125, 130

H Hallucinatory chasms, 76, 139 Hatred, 130 Hemingway, Ernest, 34–41 Heroic cycle, 172–174 Heterosexuality, 35–37, 163–164, 167 Hierarchical structures, 117–118 Holocaust, 4–5, 138, 173, 178, 182 Holotropes of imagination, 139 Homosexuality, 29, 33, 163–164 Hotel, Rusesabagina and, 186–187 Human sacrifice, 158–160, 162 Humanitarianism, 172–173 Humanity, 147, 174–175, 177–181, 184, 191 Humanized ideals, 13 Humanoids, 148, 150

I Id, 116 Idealization, 27, 82, 96 Ideals, idealization vs., 27 Identification, alienation and, 74 Identity, 177–179, 181–183 Illness, 141 Illusion, feminine, 31–32 Imagination, heroic, 68–75, 110–111, 181 Imperialism, 103–104, 106 Impotence, 35–36 In Our Time (Hemingway), 34–35 Incest, 142–143, 148–150 Individualism, 97, 172 Innocence, 100, 157–158, 173 Inquiry, ethical, 96–98, 104, 110, 116 Interaction, bravery and, 18 Interdependence, 117 Interrogation, 157–158 Intervention, radical, 174 Intimacy, 121–122, 188

Index Iraq coffins and, 48 gender and, 29 letter from, 38–39 maternal surveillance and, 56–57 Peter and, 62–63 Irrationality, 78–80 Islamic fundamentalism, 155–156 Isolation, 144

J “Jabberwocky”, 105–107, 108 Jake (The Sun Also Rises), 35–37 Jealousy, 162, 165 Jones, Ernest, 27–28, 40 Just war, 24 Justice, 86, 100

K Kate, 67–75, 85–92, 96–98 Kelly (Captain), letter of, 38–39 Kennedy, Jackie, 54–55, 57 Kenya, 61–62 Kerry, John, 29 Khmer Rouge, 178, 183 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 192 Krebs (In Our Time), 34–35 Krstic, Radislav, 179

L Laub, Dori, 14 Leadership, 189–190, 191 Levinas, 2–3 Lewis, John, 191–192 Liberian Mass Action for Peace, 61 Lion and Unicorn, 107–108 Lone Ranger, 8 Loneliness, 38, 45, 135, 152 Lost selves, 136 Lust, 31

M Male-bonding, 29–30 Mass murder, 177–179 Massacres, 176 Masturbation, 149, 151 Material existence, 177 Maternal chronicles, 120–133 Maternal surveillance, 55–63 Math murder, 177–180, 181–182, 186–187

211

212 Megalomania, 189 Memory, 110–111, 136 Menstruation, 87 Mentors, 109 Metaphorical thought, 104 Mice, 101 Milk, 188 Mimicry, 82 Modes of living, narrative, 16 Modesty, 191 Molestation, 142–143, 148–150 Mothers, 124–125, 141–144 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 61, 190 Mourning, soldiers and, 24–25 Movie theater, 148–149 Movies, 9 Murder, 99 Mushrooms, 102–103 Muslims, 179, 188 Mutual caregiving, 184, 185 Mutuality, circles of, 38–41 Mysteries, 86–87, 91–92 Mythology, 77–78 Myths of triumph, 10–11

N Names, 177–181 Narcism, 82–83, 119, 191 Narratives, 16–17, 30–34, 34–41, 86 Nazis, 4–7, 178 Negation, narratives of, 34–41 Noir idéal, 133 Numbers, 177–179, 181–187

O Obama, Barack, 159, 189–192, 193 Omnipotence, 82, 96 Omniscience, 56 Operation Homecoming (Carroll), 62 Ordinary goodness, 76 Ornstein, Anna, 182 Osama bin Laden, 165

P Pacifism, 27–28, 45, 51, 53 Pain, 177 Paranoia, 127 Paranoid regimes, 176 Parental ghosts, 136–137 Parents Anne and, 124

Index fearlessness, helplessness and, 88–89 genocide, state terror and, 184, 186 moral codes and, 96–97 presence of, 76–78 Passive bystanders, 5 Passivity, 52 Peace, heroism and, 10 Pearl Harbor, 39–40 Peer pressure, 96 Penis, 151 Persecution, 176, 180–187 Persecutory myths, 175–177 Perspective, 86 Perversity, 171 Peter grief and, 62–63 history of, 23–25, 43–47 maternal surveillance and, 57–59 protection by, 48–51 sexuality and, 52–53 tragic memory and, 54–55 Phallic bodies, 29 Phantasmagoric worlds, 78–81, 111 Photography, 47, 178 Pictograms, primal, 83 Plasticity, fear and, 18 Plowman, Dorothy, 31–32 Poetry, 30–34 Power, moral codes and, 97–98 Pregnant emptiness, 76–78 Prehistories, 136–139 Prejudice, 89–91, 96, 124 Presents, 127 Pretense, 109 Prey, 177–178 Promiscuity, 168 Propaganda, 171 Prosthesis, 24 Prostitution, 179 Protests, 59, 61 Pseudo-experience, 81–82 Psyche-soma, plastic, 79–80 Puberty, 81–83, 87–88, 90

R Radical intervention, 174 Rape, 148–150, 167, 168 Reality, 79, 88–89, 143 Reassurance, 126 Recognition, 159 Record keeping, 178 Red Knight, 108 Redundancy, 94–96

Redundant speech, 119–120 Regeneration, 136–139 Regimes, 176 Reisner, Steven, 159 Relational crisis, 82 Reporting, war and, 47–48 Resistance, 61, 173–174 Rigidity, morality and, 96–97 Robots, 148 Rosa, 139–152 Rugged individualism, 8 Rules of Battle, 108 Rusesabagina, 186–187 Rwanda, 172–173, 176, 186, 190

S S-21 prison (Cambodia), 157, 178 Sacrifice, 6, 8, 159, 177 Sacrificial bodies, 158–160, 162 Sacrificial rituals, 156 Sadism, 161–165 Salem witch trials, 157 Sarah, 181–183 Sassoon, Siegfried, 30–34, 38 Saving Private Ryan, 39–40 Saviors, 172–174 Scars, Peter and, 24 Secrecy, 142–143 Security system, 51–52, 54 Self-hatred, 140–141 September 11 attacks, 89 Sets of eyes, 7 Sex Alan and, 161–169 Anne and, 121, 131 combat zone and, 29 Rosa and, 140–141, 148–151 Sex slavery, 179 Sexuality, 52–53, 116, 167, 168–169 Sheehan, Casey, 60 Sheehan, Cindy, 60–61 Sickness, 128–129 Silence, civilian-soldier divide and, 26–27 Singularity, 182 Slavery, 178–179, 184–185, 190 Sleep, 143 Social magic, 74, 80, 84, 90 Social shame, 89 Social unconsciousness, 160, 169, 191 Soldiers, 4–8, 21, 25–30 “Soldier’s Home” (Hemingway), 34–35 Sorek, Zoran, 188 Spanish Inquisition, 157

Index

213

Spanking, 165 Spielberg, Steven, 39 State terror, 171, 173, 175–177. See also Terrorism Stoicism, 41 Storytelling, 16–17 Subjectivity, 7–8 Submission, 161–162 Subversion, 104 Sudan, 190 Suffering, 177 Suicide, 166, 167, 168 Suicide bombings, 155–156, 176, 177 Superego, 116 Superman, 8, 13–14, 17, 90, 95, 175–176 Surveillance, maternal, 55–63 Symptom of time, 137

T Talisman of supremacy, 177, 182 Tattoos, 181 Team work, 88 Telephones, 145–146 Tenniel, John, 103–104, 108 Terrorism, 89, 156–160. See also State terror The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), 35–37 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 99, 104–110 Time, 99, 137, 181, 182–183 Tolerance, 89–91 Torture, 157, 158, 177 Torture memos, 159 Tragic impossibility, 158 Transcendent gestures, 9 Transference, 132 Transfiguration Alice and, 99, 100–104 genocide, state terror and, 175 heroic, 95 Kate and, 81 Sarah and, 182 soldiers and, 19 transformation vs., 17–18 as Trickster, 107–110 Transformation, 7, 17–18, 94–95, 109 Transformational objects, 83 Translation, 108 Transmission, transgenerational, 9–10, 136–139 Transparency, 158, 159 Trauma, 14, 137–139 Trauma studies, 180–181 Traumatic transport, 182

214

Index

Trickster, 107–110, 152 Tutu, Desmond, 191 Tweedledee and Tweedledum, 107

Vietnam War, 23, 29 Villainous Other, 82 Violence, 176, 190

U

W

Unanchored dead, 25, 26, 41 Uncertainty, creativity and, 76–78 Unforeseen present, 97 Ung, Loung, 183 Unicorn, Lion and, 107–108 Unknown origins, 77–78

War crimes, 26 Warmonger at home, 33, 38 Warriors, 21, 104–107, 192 Weight, 140, 144 White Knight, 108–109 White Rabbit, 99 Wild West, taming of, 8 Willpower, 94 Wings, 67–75, 87, 90–92 Winter soldier, 29 Women, soldiers and, 28–29 World War I, 30, 116 World War II, 4, 39–40, 173, 179

V Vagina, 149–150, 152 Veils, 54, 59 Velvet revolutions, 189 Vengeance, 86 Victims, 152, 174–175